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CORRECTED  IMPRESSIONS 


0  5  4  •■  &  ** 


Corrected  Impressions 


ESSAYS  ON  VICTORIAN  WRITERS 


GEORGE    SAINTSBURY 


LONDON 

WILLIAM    HEINEMANN 

1895 


4^/g^G 


■%\^ 

PREFACE. 

nPHESE    Critical    Notes   differ   a    little    in 

scheme    and    aim    from    anything    that 

their  writer  has  hitherto  attempted.     The  shape 

N  ivhich  they  take  was  partly  suggested,   as   is 
-I 

observed  in  one  of  them,  by  some  remarks  of 

Mr.  A.  J.  Balfour's  at  the  Literary  Fund  Dinner 

of  1893,  in  London.     It  occurred  to  me  then 

"^  that  a  kind  of  foreshortened  review  of  the  im- 

r 

t  pressions,  and  the  corrections  of  them,  which 

J, 

the  great  Victorian  writers  had  produced  or 
undergone  in  my  own  case  during  the  last  thirty 
years  might  not  be  an  absolutely  uninteresting 
sample  of  **  how  it  has  struck  a  contemporary." 
It  was  not  practically  possible  to  execute  this 


iv  Preface. 

without  some  reference  to  the  progress  of  gen- 
eral as  well  as  of  individual  opinion.  But  care 
has  been  taken  to  maintain  as  far  as  possible 
the  genuineness  of  the  individual  impression, 
past  as  well  as  present.  To  do  this  it  was  neces- 
sary rather  to  give  heads  of  a  study  of  the 
authors  than  the  completed  study  itself,  and 
rather  to  say  too  little  than  to  say  too  much  ; 
but  at  the  same  time  not  to  refrain  from  a 
certain  amount  of  personal  detail.  Some  of 
the  earlier  papers  have  appeared  in  the  Indian 
Daily  News,  and  the  four  last  in  the  New 
York  Critic;   but  none  have  been  printed   in 

England. 

G.  S. 


CONTENTS 

PAGB 

''  I.  Thackeray .  i 

'  II.  Thackeray  {concluded) n 

^III.  Tennyson 21 

/  IV.  Tennyson  {concluded) 31 

^  V.  Carlyle .  41 

'^  VI.  Carlyle  {concluded)    , 50 

VII.  Mr.  Swinburne 60 

VIII.  Mr.  Swi^VM'R.^^  {concluded)      ....  70 

IX.  Macaulay 79 

X.  Macaulay  {concluded) 88 

XL  Browning 98 

XII.  Browning  {concluded) 107 

XIII.  Dickens ,     .  117 

"  XIV.  Dickens  {concluded) 127 

^'  XV.  Matthew  Arnold      ......  138 

XVI.  Matthew  Arnold  {concluded)    .     .     .  148 

\ 


vi  Contents. 

PAGE 

XVII.    Three  Mid-Century  Novelists     .     .  157 
V  XVIII.    Three  Mid-Century  Novelists  [con- 
cluded')      168 

XIX.    Mr.  William  Morris 178 

XX.    Mr.  William  Morris  {concluded')  .     .  188 

XXI.    Mr.  Ruskin .  198 

XXII.    Mr.  Ruskin  {concluded) 209 


CORRECTED    IMPRESSIONS 
I. 

THACKERAY. 

TN  a  certain  now  rather  antiquated  school  of 
theology,  the  word  "use"  was  employed 
with  a  special  application,  denoting  the  adjust- 
ment of  a  given  text,  fact,  or  other  thing  to 
beneficent  moral  purposes.  I  like  to  make  a 
use  of  critical  humility  out  of  the  fact  that  there 
was  a  time  when  I  did  not  like  Thackeray.  It 
was  a  very  short  time  in  itself,  and  it  was  a  very 
long  time  ago ;  but  from  about,  so  far  as  I  can 
remember,  my  fifteenth  year  to  my  seventeenth, 
it  existed.  The  circumstances  were  extenuat- 
ing. It  so  happened  that,  almost  ever  since  I 
could  read,  I  had  been  brought  up  on  Dickens, 
and  had  known  little  or  nothing  of  his  great 
rival  in  the  English  fiction  of  the  middle  of  the 
century,  except  that  he  was  his  rival     I  believe 


Corrected  Impressions. 


the  first  thing  that  I  ever  read  of  Mr.  Thackeray's 
was  "  Philip,"  as  it  came  out  in  the  Cornhill ; 
the  next,  "  Vanity  Fair."  Neither,  it  will  proba- 
bly be  admitted,  was  the  best  possible  introduc- 
tion to  the  subject  for  a  green  taste.  I  now 
think  considerably  better  of  "  Philip "  than 
some  professed  Thackerayans  do ;  but  I  should 
hardly  quarrel  very  fiercely  with  anybody  who 
failed  to  relish  it.  And  I  do  not  think  that 
any  boy  —  at  least  any  boy  who  is  genuine, 
and  has  not  prematurely  learnt  to  feign  liking 
for  what  he  thinks  he  ought  to  like  —  can 
really  enjoy  "  Vanity  Fair."  The  full  beauty 
of  Becky  (I  can  honestly  say  that  I  always 
saw  some  of  it)  is  necessarily  hidden  from 
him  ;  he  cannot  taste  the  majesty  of  the 
crowning  scene  with  Lord  Steyne,  or  the  even 
finer,  though  less  dramatic,  negotiations  which 
avert  the  duel ;  his  knowledge  of  life  is  insuffi- 
cient to  allow  him  to  detect  the  magnificent 
thoroughness  and  the  more  magnificent  irony 
of  the  general  treatment.  On  the  other  hand, 
he  is  sure,  if  he  is  good  for  anything,  to  be 
disgusted  with  the  namby-pambyness  of  Amelia, 


Thackeray.  3 

with  the  chuckle-headed  goodness  of  Dobbin, 
with  the  vicious  nincompoopery  and  the  selfish- 
ness of  George  Osborne.  For  these  are  things 
which,  though  experience  may  lead  to  the  re- 
tractation of  an  opinion  that  any  of  the  three  is 
unnatural,  leave  on  some  tolerably  mature  judg- 
ments the  impression  that  they  are  one-sided 
and  out  of  composition,  if  not  of  drawing. 

But  this  could  not  last  long:  after  a  few 
months,  "  Pendennis  "  came  in  my  way.  I  took 
it,  I  remember  very  well  after  thirty  years,  out 
of  a  certain  school  library,  and  I  read  it,  or 
began  to  read  it  (an  exceedingly  reprehensible 
practice)  on  my  way  home,  which  lay  through 
Hyde  Park  and  Kensington  Gardens.  If  any 
of  the  persons  into  whose  arms  I  walked  are 
still  alive,  I  humbly  ask  their  pardon.  Even  if 
they  had  not  now  mostly  been  changed  long 
ago  for  others,  it  would  be  superfluous  to 
extend  forgiveness  to  the  Park  seats  which 
avenged  these  innocents  on  my  own  knees.  It 
may  to  some  people  seem  odd,  and  to  others 
shocking,  that  "The  Newcomes"  threw  me  at 
first  rather   back.      It   had   its   revenge   later. 


4  Corrected  Impressions. 

though.  To  this  day  I  confess  that  I  think 
Ethel  rather  shadowy,  and  not  wholly  attractive ; 
Clive  something  of  what  his  own  day  would 
have  called  a  young  tiger ;  and  the  Colonel  him- 
self, despite  his  angelic  qualities  and  immortal 
end,  now  and  then  (it  is  dreadful,  but  it  must 
be  said)  a  very  little  silly.  But  "  Esmond " 
and  "The  Virginians"  together,  with  their  in- 
comparable picture  of  Beatrix,  —  the  only  true 
picture  of  a  woman  conceived  in  nature  and 
sublimed  to  the  seventh  heaven  by  art,  in 
youth  and  age  alike,  that  prose  fiction  con- 
tains, —  made  me  live  Mr.  Thackeray's  Pro- 
testant to  be.  All  my  old  prejudices  vanished. 
"  The  wreck  was  total,"  as  a  celebrated  epitaph 
of  the  last  century  has  it.  "  There  was  no  mis- 
take about  this  fellow,"  to  alter  slightly  a  great 
phrase  in  one  of  the  novelist's  own  very  best 
scenes. 

But  when  you  have  thus  "  got  salvation "  in 
matters  literary,  you  do  not,  if  the  gods  have 
made  you  at  all  critical,  proceed  to  mere  indis- 
criminate adoring.  What  you  do  proceed  to 
is  reading,  at  first  indiscriminate,  then  tolerably 


Thackeray.  5 

discriminating,  and  to  the  enjoyment  of  analys- 
ing excellence,  never  without  the  possibility  of 
admitting  defect,  but  with  a  sure  consciousness 
that  the  man  you  study  is  right  in  the  main, 
and  that  it  will  be  only  in  a  way  for  his  greater 
glory  if  you  find  out  where  and  wherefore  he 
is  sometimes  wrong.  I  shall  endeavour  to  set 
out  the  chief  results  of  thirty  years'  reading 
and  rereading  of  the  books  of  Thackeray  in  this 
spirit,  only  mentioning  further,  in  the  same 
personal  key,  that,  if  there  is  one  scene  which 
finally  made  me  his,  it  is  that —  slightly  done  in 
appearance,  and  left  to  produce  its  own  effect, 
with  the  carelessness  of  supremacy  —  in  which 
Harry  Warrington  fails  to  recognise  the  portrait 
of  Beatrix.  If  it  is  not  necessary  to  have  read 
most  of  the  good  novels,  I  would  fain  persuade 
myself  that  it  is  not  unhelpful  to  have  read  vast 
numbers  of  the  bad,  in  order  to  see  the  gran- 
deur of  this.  America,  Russia,  France  (putting 
Flaubert  out  of  the  question),  for  thirty  years 
and  more,  have  been  trying  to  beat  Thackeray's 
record  in  this  particular  field,  and  they  have 
never  come  anywhere  near  him. 


Corrected  Impressions. 


To  the  corrupted  modern  man,  what  other 
people  say  of  his  subject  always  has  a  good 
deal  to  do  with  his  impressions  of  it,  though,  il 
he  be  critically  given,  he  can  generally  get  rid 
of  any  bad  effect  thereof.  He  takes  account 
of  the  sayings,  is  rather  grateful  for  them,  owes 
to  them  sometimes  certain  initial  points  of  view 
and  lines  of  approach,  but  is  not,  strictly  speak- 
ing, much  biassed  by  them.  What  other  people 
have  said  about  Thackeray  has  gone  through 
some  three  or  four  stages.  There  was  the  firsts 
in  which  they  gradually  had  him  forced  on  their 
notice,  as  a  man  who  wrote  a  good  deal  for  the 
papers.  Some,  as  we  learn  from  the  "  Life  of 
Lever,"  thought  he  wrote  for  too  many  papers, 
and  was  not  careful  enough  in  his  selection  of 
those  organs.  Others,  as  we  learn  from  a  note 
to  Lockhart's  article  on  "  Hook,"  and  those  the 
acutest  judges  of  the  day,  thought  him  a  very 
remarkable  person  indeed.  He  had  almost 
reached  the  last  decade  of  his  too  short  life 
before  this  opinion,  or  conflict  of  opinion, 
changed,  —  though  it  must  always  be  remem- 
bered that  these  stages  of  critical  opinion  do  not 


Thackeray.  7 

end  each  as  the  other  begins,  but  overlap  and 
interpenetrate  one  another.  He  was  now  recog- 
nised as  one  of  the  greatest  writers  and  one 
of  the  greatest  novelists  of  England;  he  had 
an  ever  wider  and  stronger  influence  on  the 
coming  generation  of  novelists  and  of  writers ; 
but  it  was  said  that  he  was  dreadfully  cynical. 
This  stage  too  passed,  at  least  as  a  prevailing 
and  recognised  stage,  and  he  entered  (as  most 
men  do  who  die  comparatively  young)  by  the 
gates  of  death  into  something  like  a  full  enjoy- 
ment of  the  fame  which  was  his  due.  Of  late 
years,  I  am  told,  and  I  can  partly  perceive  evi- 
dences of  it,  he  has  entered  yet  another  phase. 
His  manner,  his  language,  his  atmosphere  of  so- 
ciety, are  getting  a  little  antiquated  for  younger 
readers.  Some  critics  have  persuaded  them- 
selves that  they  see  more  points  in  the  human 
soul  than  he  did  ;  his  analysis  is  not  quite 
thorough-going  enough,  and  so  forth.  Augustus 
Z.  from  New  York,  and  M.  Jules  from  Paris 
(or  Quimper),  and  Count  Caviarovitch  from 
Ostrolenko,  have  outstripped  Mr.  William  Make- 
peace.    He  is  a  little  rococo^ 


8  Corrected  Impressions. 

Let  us  register  these  things,  and  all  things. 
Perhaps,  though  it  may  seem  an  undue  mag- 
nification of  the  critical  office,  it  is  never  im^ 
possible  for  a  competent  critic  to  disentangle 
himself  almost  wholly  from  prejudices  of  all 
kinds,  and  to  see  his  subjects,  whether  they  be 
subjects  two  thousand  years  old,  or  subjects 
of  yesterday,  or  subjects  of  to-day,  in  a  fairly 
white  light.  The  worst  of  it  is  that  it  is  so  very 
difficult  to  decide  what  other  persons  will  agree 
to  regard  as  a  white  light.  If  their  own  eye- 
pieces are  not  quite  achromatic,  the  whitest  light 
will  seem  to  them  coloured,  and  they  will  com- 
plain to  that  effect.  But  this  difficulty  has  to 
be  faced. 

Of  few  writers  can  it  be  said  with  so  much 
confidence  as  of  Thackeray,  that  he  is  all  of  a 
piece.  He  wrote,  as  has  been  observed,  at  one 
time  of  his  life  rather  miscellaneously,  and  a 
great  deal  of  his  miscellaneous  writing  has  been 
preserved.  He  was  a  reviewer  of  all  sorts  of 
books,  a  satiric  essayist,  a  literary  critic  on  the 
great  scale,  a  social  historian,  a  lecturer,  and 
a  novelist.     When  he  was  a   novelist,  he  was 


Thackeray.  p 

very  generally  all  the  other  things  which  have 
been  enumerated  at  the  same  time  ;  and  it  not 
unfrequently  happened  that,  in  the  discharge  of 
his  miscellaneous  functions,  he  forgot  the  par- 
ticular jacket  he  had  on,  and  wrote  in  a  charac- 
ter suitable  to  quite  other  garments.     In  "  The 
English    Humourists,"    for    instance,    and    the 
"  Roundabout  Papers,"  he  is  everything  by  turns ; 
and  there  is  hardly  one  of  his  novels,  from  the 
immaturity  of  "  Catherine  "  to  the  uncompleted 
promise  of  "  Denis  Duval,"  in  which  the  reader 
who  reads  with  his  eyes  open  does  not  perceive 
that  he  has  something  much  more  than  a  mere 
novelist  to  deal  with.     Not  that  Thackeray  was 
not  a  novelist  first  of  all,  for  if  there  is  one  of 
the  pretty  numerous  gifts  which  go  to  make  up 
the  novelist  which  is  more  indispensable  to  him 
than  any  other,  it  is  the  gift  of  conceiving  and 
projecting  character.     And  this  was  the  essence, 
the  centre,  the  mainspring,  of  Thackeray's  genius. 
Whether  it  was,  as  a  gift,  separable  from  his  other 
peculiar  gift  of  style,  is  a  very  intricate  question 
of  criticism.     But  I  think  the  style  might  have 
existed  without  it,  and  therefore  is  less  distinc- 


lO  Corrected  Impressions. 

tive.  Alone  among  our  novelists,  if  not  among' 
the  novelists  of  the  world,  Thackeray  simply 
could  not  introduce  a  personage,  no  matter  how 
subordinate,  without  making  him  a  living  crea- 
ture. He  (or  she)  may  be  the  central  figure  of 
a  long  and  complicated  novel,  or  may  be  intro- 
duced to  say  a  couple  of  lines,  and  never  appear 
again,  but  Thackeray  has  no  sooner  touched 
him  than  there  is  a  human  being, —  an  entity. 
Everybody  knows  the  penalty  which  is  said,  in 
strict  Mohammedan  theology,  to  wait  upon  the 
rash  men  of  art,  that  they  will  have  somehow  or 
other  to  find  souls  for  their  creations  at  the  Day 
of  Judgment,  or  it  will  go  uncommonly  ill  with 
them.  The  prospect  must  be  rather  an  alarming 
one  for  most  "  makers  "  of  any  kind.  It  need 
never  have  troubled  Thackeray.  He  had  done 
it  beforehand.  He  could  not  introduce  a  foot- 
man, saying  some  half  dozen  words,  "My  Lady 
is  gone  to  Bright/«^,"  or  something  of  that  sort, 
without  presenting  the  fellow  for  his  trouble  with 
life  and  immortality. 


II. 

THACKERAY  {conchided), 

TT  is  perhaps  worth  while  to  expand  a  little 
-^  that  general  view  of  Thackeray's  literary 
gifts  which  has  been  put  above.  It  must  be 
remembered  that  his  literary  history  is  decid- 
edly peculiar.  He  died  (as  men  go)  young; 
and  he  began  regular  —  not  merely  casual  or 
amateur — literary  composition  very  young  in- 
deed. He  had  dabbled  in  journalism  at  Cam- 
bridge, and  there  was  not  I  think  any  time  after 
his  undergraduate  period  at  which  he  did  not 
more  or  less  practise  it.  Yet  he  was  getting 
on  for  his  fortieth  year  when  "  Vanity  Fair "  in 
its  complete  form  for  the  first  time  forced  him 
upon  the  notice  of  the  public  as  a  person  who 
could  not  be  any  longer  neglected.  Of  course, 
looking  backwards,  we  think  nowadays  that 
we  can  detect  the  excellence  which  the  world 
then   first   recognised   in   much   earlier  pieces. 


12  Corrected  Impressions. 


The  maddening  practice  of  republishing  works 
in  collected  editions  without  giving  their  original 
dates  (a  practice  for  which,  if  I  were  dictator,  I 
would  saw  any  editor  or  publisher  through 
between  two  boards)  makes  it  not  always  easy 
without  elaborate  researches  to  "  place  "  his  ear- 
lier works  exactly.  But  he  certainly  had  a  good 
ten  years'  practice  in  regular  harness  to  all  sorts 
of  vehicles,  before  in  1846  the  first  instalments 
of  "Vanity  Fair"  proclaimed  him  as  beyond  all 
doubt  or  question  a  master. 

There  are  few  more  interesting  things  than 
to  survey  all  this  early  work, —  the  Tales,  the 
Burlesques,  the  Christmas  Stories,  the  Re- 
views, the  Sketch  Books,  the  what  not.  It  is 
excessively  difficult  to  decide  whether  it  is  real 
critical  acumen  or  ex  post  facto  wiseacre-ishness 
which  makes  one  fancy  that  it  is  possible  to 
detect  the  true  Thackeray  even  in  the  very  earli- 
est period  of  the  novitiate.  But  I  do  not  think 
that  I  myself  ever  read  a  single  volume  with 
greater  interest  than  that  which  I  felt  in  the 
supplement  to  his  collected  works  published 
more  than  twenty  years  after  his  death  under 


Thackeray.  i-^ 

the  title  of  "  Miscellaneous  Essays,  etc."     It  was 
not  that  there  was  anything  exactly  new  in  it, 
for  probably  all  the  faults  and  certainly  all  the 
merits  could  have  been  paralleled  from  the  work 
previously  issued  with  the  author's  own  reimpri- 
mattir.     But  these  were   scattered   in   different 
volumes.     Here  they  were  all  in  juxtaposition; 
and  as  these  papers  are  "  impressions,"  it  is  not 
impertinent  to  add  that  the  time  of  their  appear- 
ance was  particularly  interesting  as   correcting 
and  strengthening  my  own  notions  of  Thackeray. 
It  so  happened  that  for  other  purposes  I  had 
just  been   refreshing  and  extending  my  know- 
ledge of  the  journalism  and  magazine  work  which 
immediately  preceded  or  accompanied  this  simi- 
lar work  of  his.     I  had  been  reading  with  some 
care  the  principal  Blackwood  Sind  Eraser  men,  the 
latter  Thackeray's  own  colleagues,  the  former 
beyond  all  doubt  his  and  their  models.     It  is 
only  such  a  comparison   and  contrast   as  this 
which  can  ever  bring  out  the  real  and  indepen- 
dent value  of  a  new  writer.     In  the  course  of  a 
good  many  years'  critical  reading  of  literature,  I 
have  constantly  been  struck  by  this  or  that  trait 


14  Corrected  Impressions. 

in  a  man  only  to  discover  by  fuller  reading  not 
so  much  that  he  borrowed  or  plagiarised  it  from 
somebody  else  (for  instances  of  actual  plagiarism 
are  very  rare  and  as  a  rule  of  very  little  impor- 
tance) as  that  it  was  "in  the  air"  at  the  time. 
But  if  you  compare  this  miscellaneous  work  — 
originally  undistinguished  and  at  all  times  not 
much  considered  —  of  Thackeray  with  the  work 
of  Wilson,  of  De  Quincey,  of  his  own  editor 
Maginn,  and  of  others,  you  will  very  soon  begin 
to  make  distinctions  and  mark  advances.  There 
are  of  course  many  likenesses,  many  copyings 
of  tricks  and  mannerisms,  many  condescendences 
of  this  kind  and  that.  When  Thackeray,  in  a 
very  sound  and  agreeable  article  on  "  Greenwich 
and  Whitebait"  in  Colbiirn  for  July,  1844,  enter- 
tained his  readers  with  a  procession  nominatim 
of  landlords  and  waiters  carrying  certain  dishes, 
he  was  consciously  or  unconsciously  repeating 
an  old  trick  of  the  "  Noctes  Ambrosianae " 
which  had  attained  almost  to  years  of  discre- 
tion as  he  wrote.  But  in  that  very  article  (one 
by  no  means  of  his  very  best)  the  most  careless 
reader  who  can  take  notice  at  all  will  remark 


Thackeray.  1 5 

evidences  of  an  "  eye  on  the  object,"  of  a 
satiric  comprehension  of  Hfe,  which  is  nowhere 
in  Wilson,  nowhere  in  Maginn,  nowhere  in  De 
Quincey,  nowhere  in  their  contemporaries,  — 
which,  omitting  touches  in  Scott,  had  not  been 
presented  in  English  literature  since  Fielding. 
Such  a  reader  will  find  too  a  style  which  is 
strange  and  new,  —  not  indeed  in  Thackeray 
himself,  for  touches  of  it  may  be  found  seven 
years  earlier  in  his  very  earliest  work,  but  as 
compared  with  others,  —  a  quiet  faculty  of  say- 
ing remarkable  things  and  leaving  them  to 
make  their  own  effect,  a  sort  of  urbane  ease, 
an  unforced  combination  of  the  points  of  view 
of  the  man  of  letters  and  the  man  of  the  world. 
And  perhaps  it  may  be  remembered  that  Field- 
ing also  wandered  about  in  alien  paths  of  litera- 
ture long  before  he  found  his  true  way,  and  that 
in  his  Miscellanies  also  are  the  strangest  antici- 
pations and  revealings  of  his  future  powers. 

Although,  therefore,  these  early  works,  includ- 
ing even  the  famous  "  Sketch  Books  "  and  such 
things  as  the  "Hoggarty  Diamond,"  are  amaz- 
ingly unequal  and  contain  some  things  almost 


i6  Corrected  Impressions. 

bad,  they  also  contain  intrinsic  attraction  enough 
to  content,  I  should  say,  the  most  uncritical 
reader  who  knows  good  things  when  he  sees 
them,  while  for  critical  attraction  I  think  they 
positively  grow  on  one. 

But  there  are  two  ends,  according  to  the 
proverb,  to  some  if  not  all  subjects ;  and  it  is  not 
seldom  asked  whether  there  was  not  a  decline 
as  well  as  a  growth  of  Thackeray's  powers,  and 
whether  anything  but  "Vanity  Fair,"  "  Pen- 
dennis,"  "  The  Newcomes,"  and  "  Esmond  "  can 
be  considered  to  present  that  power  at  its  height. 
It  is  impossible  not  to  observe,  in  passing,  what 
a  genius  that  must  be  as  to  which  it  is  matter  of 
dispute  whether  anything  has  to  be  added  to 
such  a  literary  baggage  as  that  of  the  four  books 
just  enumerated.  The  least  of  them  would  be 
a  passport  to  and  a  provision  for  eternity ;  and 
we  are  inquiring  whether  the  gentleman  has 
any  more  titles  and  any  more  luggage  than  all 
four.  Let  me  only  say  that  I  am  more  and 
more  convinced  that  he  has :  that  he  has  others 
even  besides  "The  Four  Georges,"  "The  English 
Humourists,"  and   the   "Roundabout  Papers," 


Thackeray.  17 

which  even  his  most  grudging  critics  would  in 
the  same  good-natured  manner  allow.  I  have 
never  quite  understood  the  common  deprecia- 
tion of  "  The  Virginians,"  which  contains  things 
equal,  if  not  superior,  to  the  very  finest  of  its 
author's  other  work,  and  includes  the  very 
ripest  expression  of  his  philosophy  of  life. 
For  though  indeed  I  do  not  approve  a  novel 
more  because  it  contains  the  expression  of  a 
philosophy  of  life,  others  do.  So,  too,  the 
irregularity  and  formlessness  of  plot  which  char- 
acterised most  of  Thackeray's  work  undoubtedly 
appear  in  it;  but  then,  according  to  the  views 
of  our  briskest  and  most  modern  critics,  plot  is 
a  very  subordinate  requisite  in  a  novel,  and  may 
be  very  well  dispensed  with.  Here  again  I  do 
not  agree,  and  I  should  say  that  Thackeray's 
greatest  fault  was  his  extreme  inattention  to 
construction,  which  is  all  the  more  remarkable 
inasmuch  as  he  was  by  no  means  a  very  rapid 
or  an  extremely  prolific  writer.  But  if  both 
these  faults  were  infinitely  greater  than  they  are, 
I  should  say  that  the  perfect  command  of  char- 
acter  and   the   extraordinary  criticisms   of  life 


Corrected  Impressions. 


which  "  The  Virginians "  contains  save  it,  and 
not  merely  save  it,  but  place  it  far  above  al- 
most everything  outside  its  writer's  own  work. 
"  Lovel  the  Widower,"  amusing  as  it  is,  falls 
admittedly  on  a  lower  plane,  and  I  do  not  know 
that  its  earlier  dramatic  form,  "  The  Wolves  and 
the  Lamb,"  is  not  its  superior.  But  "  Philip  " 
is,  I  believe,  the  great  stumbling-block.  I  have 
owned  that  it  was  so  to  me  in  my  green,  un- 
knowing youth.  Nor  in  a  rather  gray  and  at 
least  partially  knowing  age  could  I  attempt  to 
put  it  on  a  level  with  the  others,  despite  a  crowd 
of  admirable  scenes  and  incidents.  Sometimes 
I  have  thought  that  Thackeray's  infallible  eye 
for  life  played  him  a  trick  from  which  less  alert 
and  more  blear-eyed  talents  were  free.  His 
own  generation  was  passing,  but  he  could  not 
help  catching  something  of  the  way  of  the  gen- 
eration that  was  growing  up.  The  consequence 
is  that  the  manners  and  speech  of  Philip  here 
are  as  bewildering  as  the  actual  chronology, — 
which  refers  to  Mr.  Anthony  Trollope  as  an  ob- 
ject of  the  hero's  admiration  at  a  time  when, 
comparing  other  things,  it  is  certain  that  Mr. 


Thackeray.  19 

Trollope  had  not  even  made  his  first  literary- 
ventures.  Philip  is  neither  a  young  man  of 
1830  nor  a  young  man  of  i860,  nor,  as  Arthur 
Pendennis  and  Henry  Esmond  are  in  their  dif- 
ferent ways,  a  young  man  of  all  time  adjusted  to 
a  particular  date.  He  is  neither  one  thing  nor 
the  other.  And  when  he  talks  about  "  the  kids 
and  Char,"  I  could  almost  call  him  —  but  what 
I  could  almost  call  him  is  too  terrible  to  put  to 
paper. 

Yet  even  of  this  book,  the  most  dubious  of 
the  later,  as  of  "  Catherine,"  the  most  dubious 
of  the  earlier,  we  may  say.  Who  but  Thackeray 
could  have  written  it?  and,  even  after  thirty 
years'  reading,  How  shall  we  be  grateful  enough 
to  Thackeray  for  having  written  it?  For  here, 
as  nowhere  else  except  in  Fielding  himself,  is  a 
world  of  fictitious  personages  who  are  all  alive, 
who  cannot,  for  the  very  life  of  them,  say  or  do 
anything  unnatural.  Why  that  should  be  per- 
manently charming  in  art  which  is  frequently 
tedious  in  nature  is  hard,  is  perhaps  impossible 
to  tell,  and  certainly  there  is  no  need  to  discuss 
the  question  here.    But  the  fact  is  a  fact  beyond 


2Q  Corrected  Impressions. 

question,  and  it  is  in  this  fact  mainly  that  the 
certainty  of  Thackeray's  appeal  consists.  A 
favourable  impression  of  him,  once  reached, 
whether  by  happy  chance  or  sufficient  study,  is 
a  ne  varietur,  never  more  to  be  corrected  or 
altered. 


III. 

TENNYSON. 

AT  the  Literary  Fund  dinner  of  1893  Mr. 
Arthur  Balfour,  in  an  unusually  interesting 
speech  for  that  occasion,  hinted  that  he  was  not 
himself  able  to  take  quite  so  m,uch  pleasure  in 
what  is  called  Victorian  Literature  —  the  litera- 
ture of  which  the  late  Lord  Tennyson  in  verse, 
and  Mr.  Carlyle  in  prose,  were  the  unquestioned 
chiefs  —  as  some  other  persons  appeared  to  do. 
He  suggested  that  this  might  have  been  due  to 
his  being  born  a  little  too  late.  If  the  cause 
assigned  is  a  vera  causa,  it  is  one  of  some  inter- 
est to  me.  For  I  happen  to  have  been  born  not 
quite  three  years  before  Mr.  Balfour,  and  there- 
fore I  ought  to  have  been  exposed  to  very  much 
the  same  "  skiey  influences  "  in  point  of  time. 

Yet  I  do  not  think  that  any  one  can  ever 
have  had  and  maintained  a  greater  admiration 
for  the  author  of  "The  Lotos-Eaters"  than  I 


2  2  Corrected  Impressions. 

have.  This  admiration  was  born  early,  but  it 
was  not  born  full  grown.  I  am  so  old  a  Ten- 
nysonian  that  though  I  can  only  vaguely  remem- 
ber talk  about  "  Maud  "  at  the  time  of  its  first 
appearance,  I  can  remember  the  "  Idylls  "  them- 
selves fresh  from  the  press.  I  was,  however,  a 
little  young  then  to  appreciate  Tennyson,  and  it 
must  have  been  a  year  or  two  later  that  I  began 
to  be  fanatical  on  the  subject.  Yet  there  must 
have  been  a  little  method  in  that  youthful  mad- 
ness,—  some  criticism  in  that  craze.  A  great 
many  years  afterwards  I  came  across  the  decla- 
ration of  Edward  Fitzgerald,  one  of  the  poet's 
oldest  and  fastest  friends,  -  to  the  effect  that 
everything  he  had  written  after  1842  was  a 
falling  off.  That  of  course  was  a  crotchet. 
Fitzgerald,  like  all  men  of  original  but  not  very 
productive  genius  who  live  much  alone,  was  a 
crotcheteer  to  the  nth..  But  it  has  a  certain 
root  of  truth  in  it ;  and  as  I  read  it  I  remem- 
bered what  my  own  feelings  had  been  on  read- 
ing "  Enoch  Arden,"  the  first  volume  that  came 
out  after  I  had  enrolled  myself  in  the  sacred 
band.     It   was  iust  at  the   end   of  my  fresh- 


Tennyson.  23 

man's  year;  and  I  bought  a  copy  of  the  book 
(for  which  there  had  been  some  waiting,  and  a 
tremendous  rush)  on  my  way  home  from  the 
prize-giving  of  my  old  school.  To  tell  the  truth, 
I  was  a  little  disappointed.  For  "  Enoch  Arden  " 
itself,  as  a  whole,  I  have  never  cared,  despite  the 
one  splendid  passage  describing  the  waiting  in 
the  island ;  nor  for  "  Aylmer's  Field  " ;  nor  for 
divers  other  things.  "  The  Voyage  "  was  of 
the  very  best,  and  "  In  the  Valley  at  Canterets/' 
and  one  or  two  other  things.  "  Boadicea  "  was 
an  interesting  experiment.  But  on  the  whole 
one  was  inclined  to  say.  Where  is  *'  The  Lo- 
tos-Eaters"? Where  is  the  "Dream  of  Fair 
Women"?     Where  is  "The  Palace  of  Art"? 

Perhaps  they  were  nowhere ;  perhaps  only 
in  the  very  best  things  of  the  "  Ballads  "  of  1880, 
and  one  or  two  later,  did  the  poet  ever  touch  the 
highest  points  of  his  first  fine  raptures.  But  he 
never  failed,  even  to  his  death  day,  to  show  that 
he  was  the  author  of  these  raptures,  and  that  he 
could  still  go  very  near,  if  not  absolutely  up  to 
them,  when  he  chose.  It  has,  however,  been  a 
constant  criticpil  amusement  of  mine  to  try  to 


24  Corrected  Impressions. 

find  out  if  possible  whether  this  impression  was 
a  mere  fallacy  of  youth,  and  if  so  how  far.  And 
some  of  the  results  of  the  inquiry  which  has 
been  going  on  more  or  less  ever  since  I  turned 
through  the  Marble  Arch  into  Hyde  Park,  and 
took  "  Enoch  Arden  "  out  of  my  pocket  on  that 
summer  day,  may  not  improperly  form  the  sub- 
ject of  this  and  another  of  these  papers.  For 
the  inevitable  post-mortem  depreciation  has  set 
in  in  reference  to  this  great  poet  already,  and  it 
may  not  be  uninteresting  to  others  to  see  how 
it  strikes  a  contemporary  who  had  prepared 
himself  for  it. 

Readers,  and  I  hope  they  are  many,  of 
Maginn's  "  Story  without  a  Tail "  will  remember 
the  various  reasons  assigned  for  taking  a  dram, 
until  the  candid  narrator  avowed  that  he  took  it 
"  because  he  liked  a  dram."  It  is  undoubtedly 
natural  to  humanity  to  disguise  to  itself  the 
reasons  and  nature  of  its  enjoyments ;  but  I  do 
not  know  that  it  exhibits  this  possibly  amiable 
and  certainly  amusing  weakness  more  curiously 
or  more  distinctly  in  any  matter  than  in  the 
matter  of  poetry.      Men  will  try  to  persuade 


Tennyson.  25 

themselves,  or  at  least   others,,that  they  read 
poetry  because  it  is  a  criticism  of  life,  because 
it  expresses  the  doubts  and  fears  and  thoughts 
and  hopes  of  the  time,  because  it  is  a  substitute 
for  religion,  because  it  is  a  relief  from  serious 
work,  because  and  because  and  because.     As  a 
matter  of  fact,  they  (that  is  to  say  those  of  them 
who  like  it  genuinely)  read  it  because  they  like 
it,  because  it  communicates  an  experience  of 
half-sensual,  half-intellectual  pleasure  to  them. 
W/ijy  it  does  this  no  mortal  can  say,  any  more 
than  he  can  say  why  the  other  causes  of  his 
pleasures  produce  their  effect.     How  it  does,  it 
is  perhaps  not  quite  so  hard  to  explain ;  though 
here  also  we  come  as  usual  to  the  bounding-wall 
of  mystery  before  very  long.     And  it  is  further 
curious  to  note  that  the  same  kind  of  prudery 
and  want  of  frankness  comes  in  here  once  more. 
It  often  makes  people  positively  angry  to  be 
told  that  the  greatest  part,  if  not  the  whole,  of 
the  pleasure-giving  appeal  of  poetry  lies  in  its 
sound  rather  than  in  its  sense,  or,  to  speak  with 
extreme  exactness,  lies  in  the  manner  in  which 
the  sound  conveys  the  sense.     No  "  chain  of  ex- 


Q.6  Corrected  Impressions. 

tremely  valuable  thoughts  "  is  poetry  in  itself:  it 
only  becomes  poetry  when  it  is  conveyed  with 
those  charms  of  language,  metre,  rhyme,  ca- 
dence, what  not,  which  certain  persons  disdain. 

This  being  so,  and  the  mere  matter  of  all 
poetry  —  to  wit,  the  appearances  of  nature  and 
the  thoughts  and  feelings  of  man  —  being  un- 
alterable, it  follows  that  the  difference  between 
poet  and  poet  will  depend  upon  the  manner  of 
each  in  applying  language,  metre,  rhyme,  ca- 
dence, and  what  not  to  this  invariable  material. 
If  the  poet  follows  some  one  else's  manner,  he 
may  be  agreeable,  but  will  not  be  great ;  if  he  is 
great,  he  will  have  a  distinctly  new  and  original 
manner  of  his  own.  It  sometimes  happens, 
too,  that  he  will  have  a  manner  so  new  and  so 
original  that  his  time  will  be  at  first  deaf  to  it. 
We  have  all  heard  of  the  strange  objections 
which  even  Coleridge,  who  might  have  been 
thought  most  likely  of  all  living  men  to  appre- 
ciate Tennyson,  made  (though  he  did  not  fail 
wholly  in  his  appreciation)  to  the  new  poet's 
manner.  I  knew  a  much  lesser  but  even  more 
curious  and  far  more   recent   instance    myself. 


Tennyson.  27 

A  boy  of  eighteen  or  nineteen,  altogether  aver- 
age except  that  he  had,  I  think,  some  Eurasian 
strain  in  him,  neither  a  dunce  nor  a  genius  and 
decidedly  fond  of  reading,  once  took  out  of  a 
library  the  "  Poems,"  —  the  "  Poems,"  that  is  to 
say  the  volume  containing  everything  before 
the  "  Idylls  "  except  "  Maud,"  "  The  Princess," 
and  "  In  Memoriam."  After  a  day  or  so  he 
returned  it,  saying  sadly  to  the  librarian  that 
"he  could  not  read  it.  It  was  just  like  prose." 
Had  he  been  Dr.  Johnson  he  would  probably 
have  said  that  "  the  rhymes  were  harsh  and  the 
numbers  unpleasing,"  just  as  the  Doctor  did  of 
"Lycidas." 

To  us,  of  course,  on  the  other  hand,  the  whole 
or  the  greatest  charm  of  Tennyson  comes  from 
the  fact  that  he  affects  us  in  exactly  the  oppo- 
site way.  But  I  think  there  is  a  certain  excuse 
for  the  laughers  of  1830,  for  Coleridge,  and  for 
my  Eurasian  schoolfellow.  I  am  sure  at  least 
that  I  myself  read  Tennyson  and  liked  him  (for 
I  always  liked  him)  for  several  years  before  his 
peculiar  and  divine  virtue  dawned  upon  me.  It 
has  never  set  or  paled  since,  and  I  am  as  sure 


28  Corrected  Impressions. 

as  I  can  be  that  if  I  were  to  live  to  be  a  Struld- 
brug  (which  Heaven  forbid)  one  of  the  very 
last  things  of  the  kind  that  I  should  forget  or 
lose  my  relish  for  would  be  this.  But  compara- 
tively few  people,  I  think,  have  ever  fully  recog- 
nized how  extremely  original  this  virtue  of  his 
is.  The  word  "  great  "  is  most  irritatingly  mis- 
used about  poets;  and  we  have  quite  recently 
found  some  persons  saying  that  "Tennyson  is 
as  great  as  Shakespeare,"  and  other  people 
going  into  fits  of  wrath,  or  smiling  surprise  with 
calm  disdain,  at  the  saying.  If  what  the  former 
mean  to  say  and  what  the  latter  deny  is  that 
Tennyson  has  a  supreme  and  peculiar  poetic 
charm,  then  I  am  with  the  former  and  against 
the  latter.  He  has :  and  from  the  very  fact  of 
his  having  it  he  will  not  necessarily  be  appre- 
ciated at  once,  and  may  miss  appreciation 
altogether  with  some  people. 

The  recent  publication  anew  of  the  earliest 
*'  Poems  by  Two  Brothers  "  has  been  especially 
useful  in  enabling  us  to  study  this  charm.  In 
these  poems  it  is  absolutely  nowhere :  there  is 
not  from  beginning  to  end  in  any  verse,  whether 


Tennyson.  29 

attributed  to  Alfred,  Frederick,  or  Charles,  one 
suggestion  even  of  the  witchery  that  we  Tenny- 
sonians  associate  with  the  work  of  the  first- 
named.  It  appears  dimly  and  distantly  —  so 
dimly  and  distantly  that  one  has  to  doubt 
whether  we  recognise  it  by  anything  but  a  "  fal- 
lacy of  looking  back"  —  in  "Timbuctoo,"  in 
"  The  Lovers'  Tale  "  quite  distinctly,  but  uncer- 
tainly ;  and  with  much  alloy  in  the  pieces  which 
the  author  later  labelled  as  "  Juvenilia." 

It  is  true  that  these  "  Juvenilia  "  have  been  a 
good  deal  retouched,  and  that  much  of  the 
really  juvenile  work  on  which  the  critics  were 
by  no  means  unjustly  severe  has  been  left  out. 
But  the  charm  is  there.  Take  the  very  first 
stanza  of  "  Claribel."  You  may  pick  holes  in 
the  conceit  which  makes  a  verb  "  I  low-lie,  thou 
low-liest,  she  low-lieth,"  and  you  may  do  other 
things  of  the  same  kind  if  you  like.  But  who 
ever  wrote  like  that  before?  Who  struck  that 
key  earlier?  Who  produced  anything  like  the 
slow,  dreamy  music  of  the  variations  in  it? 
Spenser  and  Keats  were  the  only  two  masters 
ot  anything  in  the  remotest  degree  similar  in 


30  Corrected  Impressions. 

English  before.  And  yet  it  is  perfectly  inde- 
pendent of  Spenser,  perfectly  independent  of 
Keats.  It  is  Tennyson,  the  first  rustle  of  the 
"  thick-leaved,  ambrosial "  murmuring  which  was 
to  raise  round  English  lovers  of  poetry  a  very 
Broceliande  of  poetical  enchantment  for  sixty 
years  to  come  during  the  poet's  life,  and  after 
his  death  for  as  long  as  books  can  speak  and 
readers  hear. 


IV. 

TENNYSON  (concluded^ 

T  BELIEVE  that,  in  so  far  as  the  secret  of  a 
-*-  poet  can  be  discovered  and  isolated,  the  se- 
cret of  Tennyson  lies  in  that  slow  and  dreamy- 
music  which  was  noticed  at  the  end  of  the  last 
paper ;  and  I  am  nearly  sure  that  my  own  ad- 
miration of  him  dates  from  the  time  when  I 
first  became  aware  of  it.  "  Claribel,"  of  course, 
is  by  no  means  a  very  effective  example ;  though 
the  fact  of  its  standing  in  the  very  forefront 
of  the  whole  work  is  excessively  interesting. 
The  same  music  continued  to  sound  —  with  infi- 
nite variety  of  detail,  but  with  no  breach  of 
general  character  —  from  "  Claribel "  itself  to 
"  Crossing  the  Bar."  At  no  time  was  Tennyson 
a  perfect  master  of  the  quick  and  lively  meas- 
ures; and  in  comparison  he  very  seldom  af- 
fected them.  He  cannot  pick  up  and  return 
the  ball  of  song  as  Praed  —  another  great  master 


32  Corrected  Impressions. 

of  metre  if  not  quite  of  music,  who  preceded 
him  by  seven  years  at  Trinity  —  did,  still  less 
as  Praed  partly  taught  Mr.  Swinburne  to  do. 
There  is  nothing  in  Tennyson  of  the  hurrying 
yet  never  scurrying  metre  of  "At  a  Month's 
End,"  or  the  Dedication  to  Sir  Richard  Burton. 
His  difficulty  in  this  respect  has  not  improved 
"  The  Charge  of  the  Light  Brigade,"  and  it  is 
noticeable  that  it  impresses  a  somewhat  grave 
and  leisurely  character  even  on  his  anapaests,' — 
as  for  instance  in  the  "  Voyage  of  Maeldune." 
If  you  want  quick  music  you  must  go  else- 
where, or  be  content  to  find  the  poet  not  at  his 
best  in  it. 

But  in  the  other  mode  of  linked  and  long- 
drawn  out  sweetness  he  has  hardly  any  single 
master  and  no  superior: 

"  t/lt  midttight  the  moon  cometh 
And  looketb  down  alone," 

There  again  the  despised  "  Claribel  "  gives 
us  the  cue.  And  how  soon  and  how  miracu- 
lously it  was  taken  up,  sustained,  developed,  va- 
ried, everybody  who  knows  Tennyson    knows. 


Tennyson.  33 

"  Mariana "  is  the  very  incarnation,  the  very- 
embodiment  in  verse  of  spell-bound  stagnation, 
that  is  yet  in  the  rendering  beautiful.  The 
"  Recollections  of  the  Arabian  Nights  "  move 
something  sprightlier,  but  the  "  Ode  to  Mem- 
ory," by  far  the  greatest  of  the  "  Juvenilia,"  re- 
lapses into  the  visionary  gliding.  Even  in  "  The 
Sea  Fairies"  and  "The  Dying  Swan,"  the  oc- 
casional dactyls  and  anapaests  rather  slide  than 
skip ;  and  the  same  is  the  case  with  the  best 
lines  in"Oriana"  and  (naturally  enough)  with 
the  whole  course  of  the  "  Dirge."  All  the  ideal 
girl-portraits  except "  Lilian  "  (the  least  worthy 
of  them)  have  this  golden  languor,  which  is  so 
distinctly  the  note  of  the  earlier  poems  that  it 
is  astonishing  any  one  should  ever  have  missed 
it.  Yet,  as  I  have  said,  I  believe  I  missed  it 
myself  for  some  time,  and  certainly,  judging 
from  their  criticisms,  contemporaries  of  the 
poet  much  cleverer  than  I  never  seem  to  have 
heard  it  at  all. 

When  the  great  collection  came  it  must  have 
been  hard  still  to  miss  it;  yet  how  little  the 
English  public  even  yet  was  attuned  is  shown 
3 


34  Corrected  Impressions. 

by  the  fact  that  both  then  and  since  one  of  the 
most  popular  things  has  been  "  The  May  Queen," 
which,  if  anything  of  Tennyson's  could  be  so, 
I  should  myself  be  disposed  to  call  trumpery. 
"  The  Lady  of  Shalott "  is  very  far  from 
trumpery,  and  perhaps  the  poet's  very  happiest 
thing  not  in  a  languid  measure ;  but  even  "  The 
Lady  of  Shalott "  does  not  count  among  the 
poems  that  established  Tennyson's  title  to  the 
first  rank  among  English  poets.  "  The  Lotos- 
Eaters,"  •'  The  Palace  of  Art,"  "  A  Dream  of 
Fair  Women,"  "  CEnone,"  "  Ulysses,"  (though 
perhaps  it  will  be  said  that  I  ought  not  to  in- 
clude blank  verse  pieces,)  all  have  the  trailing 
garments  of  the  night,  not  the  rush  and  skip 
of  dawn;  and  though  there  are  some  exceptions 
among  the  rightly  famous  lyrics,  such  as  "  Sir 
Galahad  "  and  the  admirable  piece  of  cynicism 
in  "  The  Vision  of  Sin,"  they  are  exceptions. 
Even  "  Locksley  Hall "  canters  rather  than 
gallops,  and  the  famous  verses  in  "  The  Brook  " 
are  but  a  tour  de  force. 

But    it    would    be    impossible    here    to    go 
through  the  whole  of  the  poet's  work-     He  can 


Tennyson.  35 

do  many  things ;  but  he  always  (at  least  to  my 
taste)  does  his  best  in  lyric  to  slow  music. 
And  I  doubt  whether  any  one  will  again  pro- 
duce this  peculiar  effect  as  he  has  produced  it. 
It  must  be  evident,  too,  how  much  this  faculty  of 
slow  and  stately  verse  adds  to  the  effect  of  "  In 
Memoriam."  If  the  peculiar  metre  of  that 
poem  is  treated  (as  I  have  known  it  treated  by 
imitators)  in  a  light  and  jaunty  fashion  —  to 
quick  time,  so  to  speak  —  the  effect  is  very 
terrible.  But  Tennyson  has  another  secret  than 
this  for  blank  verse.  This  is  the  secret  of  the 
paragraph,  which  he  alone  of  all  English  poets 
shares  with  Milton  in  perfection.  There  is  little 
doubt  that  he  learnt  it  from  Milton,  but  the 
effect  is  quite  different,  though  the  means  re- 
sorted to  are  necessarily  much  the  same  in 
both  cases,  and  include  in  both  a  very  care- 
ful and  deliberate  disposition  of  the  full  stop 
which  breaks  and  varies  the  cadence  of  the 
line ;  the  adoption  when  it  is  thought  necessary 
of  trisyllabic  instead  of  dissyllabic  feet;  and 
the  arrangement  of  a  whole  block  of  verses 
so  that  they  lead  up  to  a  climax  of  sense  and 


^6  Corrected  Impressions. 

sound  in  the  final  line.  Almost  the  whole  secret 
can  be  found  in  one  of  the  earliest  and  per- 
haps the  finest  of  his  blank  verse  exercises,  the 
"  Morte  d'Arthur,"  but  examples  were  never 
wanting  up  to  his  very  last  book. 

These  two  gifts,  that  of  an  infinitely  varied 
slow  music  and  dreamy  motion  in  lyric  and 
that  of  concerted  blank  verse,  with  his  almost 
unequalled  faculty  of  observation  and  phrasing 
as  regards  description  of  nature,  were,  I  think, 
the  things  in  Tennyson  which  first  founded 
Tennyson-worship  in  my  case.  And  these,  I  am 
sure,  are  what  have  kept  it  alive  in  my  case, 
though  I  have  added  to  them  an  increasing 
appreciation  of  his  wonderful  skill  in  adjusting 
vowel  values.  His  subjects  matter  little :  I  do 
not  know  that  subject  ever  does  matter  much 
in  poetry,  though  it  is  all  important  in  prose. 
But  if  I  have  been  right  in  my  selection  of  his 
chief  gifts,  it  will  follow  almost  as  the  night  the 
day  that  the  vague,  the  antique,  and  to  some 
extent  the  passionate,  must  suit  him  better 
than  the  modern,  the  precise,  the  meditative. 
Not  that  Tennyson  is   by  any  means  as  some 


Tennyson.  37 

misguided  ones  hold,  a  shallow  poet;  the  ex- 
quisite perfection  of  his  phrase  and  his  horror 
of  jargon  have  deceived  some  even  of  the 
elect  on  that  point,  just  as  there  have  been 
those  who  think  that  Plato  is  shallow  because 
he  is  nowhere  unintelligible,  and  that  Berkeley 
cannot  be  a  great  philosopher  because  he  is 
a  great  man  of  letters.  But  art,  romance, 
distant  history  (for  history  of  a  certain  age 
simply  becomes  romance),  certainly  suit  him 
better  than  science,  modern  life,  or  argument. 
Vast  efforts  have  been  spent  on  developing 
schemes  of  modernised  Christianity  out  of  "  In 
Memoriam  " ;  but  the  religious  element  in  that 
poem  is  as  consistent  with  an  antiquated  ortho- 
doxy as  with  anything  new  and  undogmatic; 
and  the  attraction  of  the  poem  is  in  its  human 
affection,  in  its  revelation  of  the  House  of 
Mourning,  and  above  all  in  those  unmatched 
landscapes  and  sketches  of  which  the  poet  is 
everywhere  prodigal. 

It  is  perhaps  (if  I  may  refine  still  further  on 
the  corrections  of  impressions  which  years  of 
study  have  left)  in  the  combination  of  the  faculty 


4/^-^6 


38  Corrected  Impressions. 

of  poetical  music  with  that  of  poetical  picture 
drawing  that  the  special  virtue  of  Tennyson  lies. 
There  have  been  poets,  though  not  many,  who 
could  manage  sound  with  equal  skill ;  and  there 
have  been  those,  though  not  many,  who  could 
bring  with  a  few  modulated  words  a  visual  picture 
before  the  mind's  eye  and  almost  the  eye  of  the 
body  itself  with  equal  sureness  and  success. 
But  there  have  hardly  been  any,  outside  the  very 
greatest  Three  or  Four,  who  could  do  both  these 
things  at  the  same  time  in  so  consummate  a 
fashion.  The  very  musical  poets  are  too  apt  to 
let  the  sharp  and  crisp  definition  of  their  picture 
be  washed  away  in  floods  of  sound ;  the  very 
pictorial  poets  to  neglect  the  musical  accompani- 
ment. Tennyson  never  commits  either  fault. 
The  wonderful  successions  of  cartoons  in  the 
"  Palace  "  and  the  "  Dream  "  exhibit  this  in  his 
very  earliest  stage.  If  any  one  has  ever  in  this 
combination  of  music,  draughtsmanship,  and 
colour  equalled  him  who  wrote, 

'*  One  seemed  all  dark  and  red,  a  tract  of  sand, 
j4nd  some  (me  pacing  there  alone, 
IVho  paced  for  ever  in  a  glimmering  land. 
Lit  with  a  lozv  large  moon,'' 


'Tennyson.  39 

I  do  not  know  him.  The  first  stanza  of  "  The 
Lotos-Eaters  "  has  the  same  power  of  filling  eye 
and  ear  at  once,  so  that  it  is  almost  impossible  to 
decide  whether  you  hear  the  symphony  or  see 
the  picture  most  clearly.  And  at  the  very  other 
extreme  of  the  poet's  poetical  life,  in  those 
famous  lines  which  united  all  competent  suffrages 
(though  one  egregious  person  I  remember 
called  them  "  homely  "  and  divers  wiseacres  puz- 
zled over  the  identity  of  the  "pilot"  and  the 
propriety  of  his  relation  of  place  toward  the 
*'  bar  "),  this  master  faculty  again  appeared. 

"  IVitb  such  a  tide  as  moving  seems  asleep, 
Too  full  for  sound  or  foam,'' 

are  words  which  make  the  very  picture,  the 
very  foamless  swirl,  the  very  soundless  volume 
of  sound,  which  they  describe. 

No !  In  the  impressions  given  by  such  a  poet 
as  this,  when  they  have  been  once  duly  and  fairly 
received,  there  can  be  no  correction,  except  a 
better  and  better  appreciation  of  him  as  time 
goes  on.  The  people  who  have  liked  what  was 
not  best,  or  have  not  liked  what  was  best,  may 
grow  weary  of  well  admiring.     Those  who  look 


40  Corrected  Impressions. 

rather  at  the  absence  of  faults  than  at  the  pres- 
ence of  beauties  may  point  to  incongruities  and 
mediocrities,  to  attempts  in  styles  for  which  the 
poet  had  little  aptitude,  to  occasional  relapses 
from  the  grand  manner  to  the  small  mannerism, 
and  so  forth.  But  those  whose  ears  and  eyes 
(if  not,  alas !  their  lips)  Apollo  has  touched, 
will  never  make  any  mistake  about  him.  They 
may  as  in  other  —  as  in  all  —  cases  be  more  or 
fewer  as  time  goes  on :  there  may  be  seasons 
when  the  general  eye  grows  blind  and  the  general 
ear  deaf  to  his  music  and  his  vision.  But  that 
will  not  matter  at  all.  So  long  as  the  unknown 
laws  which  govern  the  presentation  of  beauty  in 
sight  and  sound  last,  beauty  will  be  discovered 
here  just  as  we  ourselves  after  two  thousand 
years  find  it  in  the  ancient  tongues  which  we 
cannot  even  pronounce  with  any  certainty  that 
we  are  nearer  to  the  original  than  Mr.  Hamer- 
ton's  little  French  boy  was  when  he  tried  to 
vocalise  that  very  stanza  of  **  Claribel "  to  which 
I  have  referred  above. 


V. 

CARLYLE. 

T  BELIEVE  it  will  be  generally  admitted  that 
■^  there  is  nowadays  no  more  distinct  sign  of  a 
man's  having  reached  the  fogey,  and  of  his 
approaching  the  fossil,  stage  of  intellectual 
existence  than  the  fact  that  he  has  an  ardent 
admiration  for  Carlyle.  I  have  collected  this 
inference  from  a  large  number  of  observations ; 
and,  if  I  am  not  mistaken,  have  seen  it  more  than 
once  definitely  laid  down  as  a  starting  point  and 
premiss  by  the  younger  sort.  This  is  not  only 
interesting  in  itself,  but  also  and  perhaps  still 
more  as  an  instance  of  the  truth  of  the  ancient 
saying  that  old  age  cometh  upon  a  man  without 
his  perceiving  it.  For  it  was  but,  so  to  speak, 
the  other  day  that  to  admire  Carlyle  was  still  a 
mark,  not  indeed  of  intense  or  daring  innovation 
(that  stage  was  over  when  the  present  writer 
was  in  his  nurse's  arms),  but  yet  of  heresy  and 


42  Corrected  Impressions. 

opposition  to  the  settled  precepts  of  the  sages. 
It  cannot  be  said  that  up  to  Carlyle's  own  death 
the  constituted  authorities  in  things  literary  and 
intellectual  were  ever  fully  reconciled  to  his  style, 
his  thought,  or  his  general  attitude;  and  great 
as  is  the  influence  which  —  especially  perhaps 
during  the  third  quarter  of  the  century  —  he 
exercised  over  individuals,  no  party  in  politics, 
no  school  in  letters  or  philosophy,  ever  could 
claim  him  or  stomach  him,  as  a  whole  stomachs 
a  whole. 

It  is  the  proudest  memory  of  my  own  life 
that  a  person  of  distinction  once  said  to  me 
in  a  rage,  "  You  like  Carlyle  because  he  has 
made  you  more  of  a  Tory  than  the  Devil  had 
made  you  already."  But  without  admitting  or 
denying  the  justice  of  this  soft  impeachment  in 
the  individual  case,  it  is  quite  certain  that  Tories 
as  a  class  did  not  like  Mr.  Carlyle,  nor  he  them. 
They  did  not  like  him  because  of  his  flings  and 
crotchets  on  separate  parts  of  their  creed;  he 
did  not  like  them  because,  I  think,  he  knew 
himself  to  be  one  of  them  and  yet  would  not 
confess  it.     The  average  mid-century  Liberal,  on 


Carlyle.  4j 

the  other  hand,  could  not  help  —  unless  he  was 
a  very  dull  or  a  very  clever  man  indeed  —  regard- 
ing Mr.  Carlyle  as  something  like  Antichrist,  a 
defender  of  slavery,  a  man  whose  dearest  delight 
it  was  to  gore  and  toss  and  trample  the  sweetest 
and  most  sacred  principles  of  the  Manchester 
school ;  a  stentorian  scoffer  who  roared  sarcasms 
over  Progress  and  Perfectibility,  and  to  whom 
House  of  Commons,  manufacturing  centres,  Great 
Exhibitions,  and  so  forth,  were  only  different  kinds 
of  filthy  and  futile  bauble  shops.  It  was  impos- 
sible, I  say,  that  the  mid-century  Liberal,  whether 
his  Liberalism  was  of  the  common-sense  type  of 
Macaulay,  or  the  doctrinaire  type  of  Mill,  or  the 
sentimental  type  of  Dickens,  should  do  anything 
but  regard  Carlyle  as  a  kind  of  hippopotamus, 
ravaging  and  trampling  the  fair  fields  of  promise. 
But  the  curious  thing  is  that  no  reaction  of  the 
usual  kind  has  come  to  his  rescue.  The  parties, 
or  the  names,  (for  I  own  that  I  see  uncommonly 
little  difference  between  Tories  and  Liberals 
now,)  that  represent  the  modifications  of  pub- 
lic opinion  by  the  results  of  the  Second  and 
Third  Reform  Bills,  have  not   gone  as  a  rule 


44  Corrected  Impressions. 

nearer  to,  but  farther  from  Carlyle's  ideal.  It  is 
impossible  to  imagine  anything  more  anti-Car- 
lylian  than  the  washy  semi-Socialism,  half  sen- 
timental, half  servile,  which  is  the  governing 
spirit  of  all  but  a  very  few  politicians  to-day. 
Nor  is  it  surprising  that  a  world  which,  whether 
with  tongue  in  cheek  or  not,  praises,  blesses,  and 
magnifies  "  democracy,"  should  be  enthusiastic 
in  favour  of  a  prophet  whose  relation  to  demo- 
cracy was  pretty  exactly  the  relation  of  Elijah 
to  Baal.  Add  to  this  the  existence  of  a  con- 
siderable literary  class  which  takes  very  little 
interest  in  politics,  a  good  deal  in  art  (for  which 
Carlyle  cared  absolutely  nothing),  and  most  of 
all  in  mere  literature  (which  he  always  attempted 
to  scorn  and  snub),  and  it  is  not  very  surprising 
that  Carlyle  is  not  popular  nowadays  with  our 
youth,  and  that  to  admire  him  is,  as  I  have  said, 
the  mark  of  a  fogey  and  a  fossil. 

So  be  it.  Yet  the  fossil  is  a  thing  that  abides, 
and  has  not  even  Mr.  Thackeray  sung  the  joys 
of  being  a  fogey?  At  any  rate,  as  for  me  and 
my  intellectual  house,  we  intend  to  continue  to 
serve  Carlyle.     Whether  it  be  due  to  those  pre- 


Carlyle.  45 

liminary  operations  of  the  Devil,  to  which  my 
friend  referred,  or  to  some  other  reason,  I  can- 
not remember  a  period  at  which  the  reading  of 
Carlyle  was  not  to  me  as  the  reading  of  some- 
thing that  one  had  always  thought  but  had  never 
been  able  to  express.  It  was  a  lucky  accident, 
no  doubt,  that  I  began  at  the  beginning,  to  wit, 
with  "  Sartor  Resartus,"  which  I  remember  read- 
ing at  so  early  an  age  that  a  great  part  of  it 
must  have  been  the  merest  Abracadabra  to  me. 
But  there  is  nothing  like  providing  children 
(accidentally,  if  possible)  with  good  abracada- 
bras which  as  they  grow  up  shall  become  clear 
to  them.  If  anybody  had  preached  Carlyle  to 
me,  I  dare  say  I  should  have  been  much  longer 
before  the  honey  in  that  lion  won  my  tongue, 
but  as  it  was  the  process  of  discovery  was  sure, 
if  not  excessively  rapid.  The  "  Cromwell "  did 
indeed  a  little  stick  in  my  gizzard  until  I  was 
old  enough  to  discover  the  truth  that  Carlyle's 
particular  fads  and  fancies  are,  as  a  rule,  matters 
of  no  particular  importance,  and  that  his  gen- 
eral attitude  is  the  pearl  of  price.  And  by 
some   happy   chance    the   "  Latter   Day   Pam- 


46  Corrected  Impressions. 

phlets "  did  not  come  in  my  way  till  I  had 
already  begun  to  take  a  considerable  interest  in 
politics.  That  book,  with  all  its  divagations,  all 
its  extravagances,  all  its  occasional  lapses  of 
taste  and  unadvised  speaking  about  things  which 
Carlyle  miscomprehended,  partly  owing  to  edu- 
cation and  partly  owing  to  pride,  seems  to  me  the 
very  gospel  of  English  politics  in  modern  times, 
a  sort  of  modern  "  Politicus  "  in  the  spirit  and 
tone  of  which  every  Englishman  should  strive 
to  soak  and  saturate  himself.  It  seemed  to  me 
so  then :   it  has  never  failed  to  seem  so  since. 

It  is,  I  think,  the  mistake  of  demanding  a 
positive  gospel  instead  of  negative  warnings  in 
the  first  place,  and  in  the  second  the  inability  to 
appreciate  "  the  humour  of  it "  to  the  full,  which 
have  been  at  the  root  of  most  recent  deprecia- 
tion of  Carlyle,  though  no  doubt  also  reaction 

I  from  the  violent  mannerisms  of  his  style  and  a 
not  ungenerous  but  rather  unintelligent  disgust 
at  the  inordinately  voluminous  and  very  ill- 
managed  personal  revelations  of  his  life  must 
also  be  allowed  for.     People  have  insufficiently 

V    appreciated  the  symbolism  which  plays  so  very 


Carlyle.  4-7 

large  a  part  in  his  work.  The  two  largest  indi- 
vidual parts  of  that  work  are  occupied,  the  one 
with  an  apotheosis  from  the  point  of  view  of  a 
denouncer  of  cant  of  a  man  who  canted  against 
despotism  his  way  to  the  headship  of  the  Com- 
monwealth of  England,  and  then  continued  to 
cant  as  a  despot  to  the  day  of  his  death,  the 
other  with  the  glorification  of  a  selfish  and  sor- 
did scoundrel  whose  chief  merits  were  that  he 
had  an  indomitable  will,  and  could  have  written  £ 
sincere  and  forcible  treatise  De  Contemptu  VitcB. 
But,  by  a  paradox  which  I  have  never  been  able 
to  make  up  my  mind  whether  to  attribute  to  a 
completely  or  a  partially  humoristic  view,  the 
Cromwell  and  the  Frederick  of  Carlyle,  though 
he  has  delineated  them  for  the  benefit  of  other 
people  with  a  fidelity  and  a  vigour  of  bio- 
graphical art  beside  which  even  Boswell,  even 
Lockhart,  are  tame  and  shadowy,  are  as  objects 
of  admiration  pure  symbols.  The  unctuous 
butcher  of  Tredagh,  who  pretended  to  revenge 
the  massacres  committed  by  the  Irish  of  1641 
on  a  garrison  which  he  knew  to  consist  very 
largely  of  pure  English  troops,  the  filibuster  of 


48  Corrected  Impressions. 

Silesia  and  the  fribble  of  Rheinsberg,  who  had 
all  vices  but  those  that  are  amiable  and  hardly 
any  virtues  but  those  which  are  unattractive,  live 
as  they  lived  in  his  pages.  Nobody  but  a  mere 
idiot  can  accuse  Carlyle  of  garbling  out  a  damn- 
ing or  foisting  in  a  flattering  trait.  And  yet  all 
the  while  he  is  glorifying  and  extolling  in  the 
one  a  symbol  of  upright  humanity,  in  the  other 
a  symbol  of  patriotic  heroism. 

These  apparent  contradictions  run  throughout 
not  only  these  books,  but  a  great  part  of  Carlyle's 
other  works,  and  they  seem  to  have  been  too 
much  for  many.  "  Am  I  to  admire  a  brute  like 
Frederick?"  says,  and  says  not  ungenerously, 
the  neophyte.  "I  won't  do  anything  of  the 
kind !  "  And  he  does  not  see  that  what  he  is 
required  to  admire  is  —  not  the  actual  Frederick 
who  was  a  kind  of  crowned  bandit  in  public  life, 
and  in  private  a  harsh  master,  a  fickle  friend,  a 
stingy  patron,  a  man  of  the  worst  possible  taste 
in  aesthetics  and  ethics,  spiteful,  treacherous, 
mean  —  but  a  Frederick  who  is  a  kind  of  ab- 
straction of  the  Ruler,  a  personified  and  incar- 
nate Government.    Indeed,  the  fact  of  this  being 


Carlyle.  49 

practically  Carlyle's  last  book,  and  the  only  one 
which  he  wrote  for  a  very  large  public,  with  the 
further  facts  of  its  enormous  size,  of  its  being 
written  in  a  sort  of  short-hand  of  mannerism 
and  of  its  containing  besides  the  panegyric  of 
Frederick  himself,  the  apology  at  least  of  his 
father,  must  be  admitted  to  have  been  unfortu- 
nate, and  to  have  accounted  to  some  extent  for 
that  sudden  falling  off  of  Carlylians  which  has 
been  noted.  For  it  so  happened  that  the  very 
generation  which  in  the  natural  course  of  things 
grew  up  prepared  to  be  his  admirers  was,  to 
speak  vernacularly,  choked  off  by  the  issue  of 
this  huge  and  not  altogether  grateful  history 
for  years  running.  No  book  probably  could  be 
worse  to  begin  a  study  of  Carlyle  upon. 

And  this,  I  think,  is  a  pretty  full  account  of 
the  various  adverse  influences  to  which  the  Car- 
lylian  impressions  of  a  man  who  began  Carlyle, 
as  I  did,  thirty  or  five  and  thirty  years  ago,  have 
been  exposed  in  the  mean  time.  It  will  take 
another  paper  to  say  something  of  the  effect, 
whether  of  correction  or  confirmation,  that  they 
have  undergone  in  consequence. 


VI. 

CARLYLE  {concluded). 

TT  will  perhaps  have  appeared  already  from 
-^  what  was  said  in  the  last  paper  that,  after 
having  passed  through,  or  at  least  been  con- 
temporary with,  all  the  fluxes  and  gusts  of  opin- 
ion there  mentioned,  I  am  an  impenitent  and 
hardened  Carlylian.  Of  course  a  great  deal  has 
to  be  added  to  Carlyle,  and,  as  has  been  already 
admitted  and  asserted,  something  has  to  be 
taken  away  from  him — in  the  sense  that  no  man 
in  his  senses  would  attempt  to  indorse  every 
particular  Carlylian  utterance.  He  was  often 
bilious ;  he  was  not  seldom  blind ;  and  as  for  his 
strange  contemporary  and  counterpart  across 
the  Channel,  who  for  half  a  dozen  years  less  at 
the  beginning,  and  half  a  dozen  more  at  the 
end,  represented  the  French  genius  just  as 
Carlyle  did  the  English,  it  was  almost  impossi- 
ble for  him  not  to  caricature  and  reduce  to  the 


Carlyle.  51 

absurd  his  own  views  and  formulas,  though  he 
and  Victor  Hugo  achieved  this  result  in  very 
different  ways.  The  Carlylians  pure  and  simple, 
though  they  included  some  men  of  genius  such 
as  were  at  different  times  Kingsley  and  Mr. 
Ruskin  and  Mr.  Froude,  were  apt  to  be  rather 
terrible  as  well  as  brilliant  examples.  When 
they  were  not  brilliant  th'ey  were  terrible  purely. 
They  are  not  very  rampant  now,  and  it  would 
be  unkind  to  specify  them  by  name ;  but  it  may 
be  most  frankly  confessed  that  "  middle-class 
Carlylese  "  was  one  of  the  worst  dialects  ever 
known,  both  in  form  and  in  matter. 

Indeed,  there  are  not  inconsiderable  regions 
of  interest  where  Carlyle  does  not  count.  For 
the  whole  domain  of  the  plastic  arts  he  seems  to 
have  had  no  kind  of  fancy  or  faculty.  Even  in 
literature,  though  at  his  best  and  in  his  earlier 
days,  when  he  had  not  begun  to  "pontify  "  and 
in  the  solitude  of  Craigenputtock  took  real 
trouble  to  master  his  subjects,  he  attained  the 
very  first  rank  as  a  literary  critic,  there  were 
large  gaps  and  rents  in  his  faculty  of  apprecia- 
tion.    He  seems  to  have  wanted  —  a  want  which 


52  Corrected  Impressions. 

I  fear  is  more  common  than  is  allowed  to  appear 
—  all  affection,  all  sense  of  any  kind  for  poetry 
as  poetry.  Some  of  the  greatest  expression  on 
things  which  he  did  care  for  is  to  be  found  in 
poets,  and  then  he  cared  for  them ;  but  it  was 
not  as  poets.  The  same  exactly  may  be  said  of 
his  attitude  to  prose  fiction.  Except  on  the 
purely  mathematical  side,  he  did  not,  I  think 
care  much  for  science.  For  all  forms  of  the- 
ology he  had  a  disdain  which  was  partly  igno- 
rant and  a  mere  expression  of  personal  distaste, 
partly  I  fear  a  form  of  personal  arrogance.  In 
philosophy  itself  I  do  not  know  that  he  was  very 
great  on  the  purely  metaphysical  side.  But,  like 
Henry  the  Eighth,  he  "  loved  a  man,"  and  I  am 
not  quite  sure  that  (in  this  respect  not  resem- 
bling that  sovereign)  he  qualified  the  affection 
by  any  others.  Such  a  historian  on  the  bio- 
graphical and  anthropological  side  the  world 
has  never  seen.  To  his  own  contemporaries  he 
was  often  foolishly  and  scandalously  unjust; 
and  probably  nothing  has  done  him  so  much 
harm  with  those  who  are  apt  to  fly  off  at  tan- 
gents when  special  points  of  their  own  fancy  are 


Carlyle.  53 

touched,  as  his  posthumous  depreciations  of 
Lamb,  of  De  Quincey,  of  Newman,  and  of  oth- 
ers as  different  in  their  different  ways  as  these. 
But  when  he  got  hold  of  "  a  man  "  in  history,  it 
seems  to  me  that  it  was  absolutely  impossible 
for  him  to  miss  hitting  off  that  man  to  the  life. 
And  he  could  in  the  same  way  seize  a  period,  a 
movement,  a  set  of  incidents,  with  a  grasp  of 
which  I  am  sure  it  is  enough,  and  I  do  not  think 
that  it  is  too  much,  to  say  that  the  result  was 
Gibbon  without  his  obstinate  superficiality,  and 
Thucydides  without  his  disappointing  asceticism 
in  rhetoric  and  eloquence. 

Take,  for  instance,  "  The  French  Revolution." 
It  has  been  to  me  an  inexhaustible  joy  for  twenty 
or  thirty  years  past  to  read  the  excellent  per- 
sons who,  in  English  and  French  and  German, 
have  undertaken  to  "  correct "  Carlyle.  They 
have  demonstrated  in  I  dare  say  the  most  suffi- 
cient and  triumphant  way  that  he  sometimes 
represents  a  thing  as  having  happened  at  two 
o'clock  on  Thursday  when  it  actually  hap- 
pened on  Tuesday  at  three  o'clock.  They 
have,  I   believe,  made   some   serious   emenda- 


54^  Corrected  Impressions. 

tions  in  the  number  of  leagues  travelled  and 
the  menu  of  the  meals  eaten  by  Louis  the  Six- 
teenth on  his  way  to  and  from  Varennes,  But 
have  they  to  the  satisfaction  of  the  phronimos, 
the  Aristotelian  intelligent  person,  altered  or 
destroyed  one  feature  in  the  Carlylian  picture 
of  the  uprising  and  of  the  Terror?  Not  they. 
On  the  contrary,  the  greatest  of  them  all,  M. 
Taine,  after  protesting  against  Carlyle  in  his 
youth  came  to  tread  in  Carlyle's  very  steps  in 
his  age.  And  it  could  not  be  otherwise.  The 
French  Revolution  of  Carlyle  is  the  French 
Revolution  as  it  happened,  as  it  was.  The 
French  Revolution  of  the  others  is  the  French 
Revolution  dug  up  in  lifeless  fragments  by 
excellent  persons  with  the  newest  patent  pick- 
axes.   I  do  not  know  whether  this  extraordinary 

-  historico-biographical  faculty  can  be  in  any  way 
connected,  after  the  fashion  of  cause  and  effect, 
with  his  other  great  quality,  his  peculiar  way  of 

V-  treating  ethics  and  politics,  the  only  subjects  in 
which  he  seems  to  have  taken  a  thorough  inter- 
est Man  to  him  was  indeed  a  "  political  beast " 
in  the  old  phrase,  extending  the  meaning  to  eth- 


Carlyle.  55 

ics  as  the  Greeks  themselves  would  have  done. 
Here  again  there  were  no  doubt  gaps,  especially 
that  huge  one  of  his  complete  incapacity  to 
enter  into  the  very  important  division  of  human 
sentiment,  which  is  called  for  shortness  love. 
Of  "the  way  of  a  man  with  a  maid"  Carlyle 
never  showed  much  comprehension,  nor  in  it 
much  interest,  which  is  doubtless  a  pity.  But  of 
the  way  of  a  man  in  political  society  he  showed 
a  very  great  comprehension  indeed,  as  well  as  of 
that  other  way  which  his  forefathers  would  have 
called  "  walking  with  God,"  that  is  to  say,  of  per- 
sonal conduct  and  attitude  towards  the  fortunes 
and  mysteries  of  life. 

It  is  here  that  his  gift  of  many-coloured  and 
many-formed  language  was  applied  most  re- 
markably and  perhaps  most  profitably.  As  has 
been  said,  or  hinted,  above,  it  is  not  to  Carlyle 
that  you  must  go  for  positive  precepts  of  any 
kind.  But  as  a  negative  teacher  he  has  few 
equals.  "Don't  funk;  don't  cant;  don't  gush; 
don't  whine ;  don't  chatter ;  "  —  these  and  some 
others  like  them  were  his  commandments,  and  I 
do  not  know  where  to  look  for  a  better  set  of 


56  Corrected  Impressions. 

their  kind.  But  they  were  elementary  and  trivial 
in  reference  to  certain  larger  and  vaguer  pre- 
cepts of  the  Carlylian  decalogue  or  myriologue. 
The  two  greatest  of  these,  as  it  seems  to  me,  are, 
"  Never  mistake  the  amount,  infinitesimal  if  not 
■minus,  of  your  own  personal  worth  and  impor- 
tance in  this  world,"  on  the  one  hand,  and 
"Never  care  for  any  majority  of  other  infini- 
tesimals who  happen  to  be  against  you,"  on  the 
other.  Ever  since  1789  at  least,  the  idol  from 
which  men  should  have  prayed  to  be  kept,  and 
which  has  been  growing  year  by  year  and  dec- 
ade by  decade,  is  the  worship  of  the  majority ; 
and  the  cream,  the  safest  and  soundest  part  of 
the  Carlylian  doctrine,  is :  "  Don't  care  one  rap, 
or  the  ten-thousandth  part  of  one  rap,  for  the 
majority.  You  may  be  —  you  very  likely  are 
—  a  fool  yourself;  but  it  is  as  nearly  as  possible 
certain  that  the  majority  of  the  majority  are 
fools,  and  therefore,  though  you  need  not  neces- 
sarily set  yourself  against  them,  you  are  abso- 
lutely justified  in  neglecting  them."  "  Do  your 
duty,"  which  he  also  preached,  is  of  course  a 
more  strictly  virtuous  doctrine,  and  it  is  also  a 


Carlyle.  57 

much  older  one.  But  it  is  open  to  the  retort, 
"Yes,  but  what  is  my  duty?"  which  is  never 
specially  easy  and  often  extremely  difficult  to 
answer.  Nor  is  it  more  specially  suited  for  this 
day  than  for  any  other.  But  "  Don't  worship 
the  majority  "  is  the  very  commandment  needed 
in  the  nineteenth  century,  and  likely,  it  would 
seem,  to  be  needed  still  more  in  the  twentieth. 
Even  if,  as  it  rarely  may  be,  the  majority  is 
right,  the  fact  that  it  is  the  majority  does  not 
make  it  so,  and  when  there  is  no  reason  for 
believing  it  to  be  right  except  that  it  is  the  ma- 
jority, then  that  is  reason  sufficient  for  electing 
to  regard  it  as  wrong. 

This  anti-democratic  tone  and  temper  —  en- 
forced and  fed,  it  may  be,  in  his  own  case,  by 
too  much  indulgence  in  the  luxury  of  scorn,- 
by  too  much  contempt  for  his  fellows,  by  too  - 
unsocial  a  view  of  life  —  was,  as  it  seems  to 
me,  what  Carlyle  had  to  teach  and  did  teach. 
His  applications  of  it  in  particular  may  not 
always  have  been  wise,  but  they  were  made 
always  with  the  most  astonishing  diable  au 
corps,  and   in  a  style  which,  though  I  should 


58  Corrected  Impressions. 

be  very  sorry  to  see  it  generally  imitated,  and 
though  it  was  sometimes  very  nearly  bad,  was 
at  its  best  surpassed  by  no  style,  either  in  Eng- 
lish or  in  any  other  language,  for  pure  force  and 
intense  effect,  —  full  of  lights  and  colours,  now 
as  fierce  as  those  of  fire,  now  as  tender  as  those 
of  fire  also,  —  full  of  voices  covering  the  whole 
gamut  from  storm  to  whisper.  Whether  the 
great  volume  of  his  work,  the  exceptions,  the 
inequalities,  the  crotchets  and  lacks  of  catholi- 
city in  it,  will  seriously  injure  that  work  with 
posterity  is  of  course  very  difficult  to  say. 
Work  which  requires,  as  this  does,  a  certain 
initiation  and  novitiate,  perhaps  also  a  certain 
pre-established  harmony  of  temper  and  taste, 
is  always  heavily  weighted  in  competing  for 
the  attention  of  posterity.  But  I  hope  at  least 
that  Carlyle  will  continue  even  in  the  evil  days 
to  inspire  some  with  determination  malignum 
spertiere  vulgus  ;  and  I  feel  nearly  sure  that  when 
the  tide  turns,  as  it  must  some  day,  and  the  rule 
of  the  best  and  fewest,  not  of  the  most  and  worst, 
again  becomes  the  favourite,  his  works  will  sup- 
ply texts  for  the  orthodox  as  they  now  do  for 


Carlyle.  59 

heretics.  At  any  rate,  I  am  sure  that  no  one 
who  ever  goes  to  them  will  miss  the  splendours 
of  pure  literature  which  illuminate  their  rugged 
heights  and  plateaus,  and  that  some  at  least  will 
recognize  and  rejoice  in  the  high  air  of  love  for 
noble  things  and  contempt  for  things  base  which 
sweeps  over  and  through  them. 


VII. 

MR.   SWINBURNE. 

T  DO  not  suppose  that  anybody  now  alive 
-^  (I  speak  of  lovers  of  poetry)  who  was  not 
alive  in  1832  and  old  enough  then  to  enjoy  the 
first  perfect  work  of  Tennyson,  has  had  such  a 
sensation  as  that  which  was  experienced  in  the 
autumn  of  1866  by  readers  of  Mr.  Swinburne's 
"  Poems  and  Ballads."  And  I  am  sure  that  no 
one  in  England  has  had  any  such  sensation  since. 
The  later  revelation  had  indeed  been  preceded 
by  more  signs  and  tokens  than  the  earlier. 
Tennyson's  first  work  had  passed  unknown  or 
had  been  laughed  at;  at  least  two  remarkable 
volumes  (not  to  mention  "The  Queen  Mother" 
and  "  Rosamond ")  had  already  revealed  to  fit 
readers  what  there  was  in  Mr.  Swinburne.  The 
chorus  in  "  Atalanta,"  "  Before  the  beginning  of 
years,"  had  attracted  the  highest  admiration 
from  impartial  and  unenthusiastic  judges,  while 


Mr.  Swinburne.  6i 

it  had  simply  swept  younger  admirers  off  their 
legs  with  rapture ;  and  the  lyrics  of  "  Chaste- 
lard  "  had  completed  the  effect  in  the  way  of 
exciting,  if  not  of  satisfying,  expectation. 

Now  we  were  told,  first,  that  a  volume  of  ex- 
traordinarily original  verse  was  coming  out; 
now,  that  it  was  so  shocking  that  its  publisher 
repented  its  appearance ;  now,  that  it  had  been 
reissued,  and  was  coming  out  after  all.  The 
autumn  must  have  been  advanced  before  it  did 
come  out,  for  I  remember  that  I  could  not  obtain 
a  copy  before  I  went  up  to  Oxford  in  October, 
and  had  to  avail  myself  of  an  expedition  to 
town  to  "  eat  dinners "  in  order  to  get  one. 
Three  copies  of  the  precious  volume,  with 
"  Moxon "  on  cover  and  *'  John  Camden  Hot- 
ten  "  on  title  page,  accompanied  me  back  that 
night,  together  with  divers  maroons  for  the 
purpose  of  enlivening  matters  on  the  ensuing 
Fifth  of  November.  The  book  was  something 
of  a  maroon  in  itself  as  regards  the  fashion  in 
which  it  startled  people;  and  perhaps  with 
youthful  readers  the  hubbub  did  it  no  harm. 
We    sat    next    afternoon,    I    remember,    from 


62  Corrected  Impressions. 

luncheon  time  till  the  chapel  bell  rang,  reading 
aloud  by  turns  in  a  select  company  "  Dolores  " 
and  "  The  Triumph  of  Time,"  "  Laus  Veneris  " 
and  "Faustine,"  and  all  the  other  wonders  of 
the  volume.  There  are  some  who  say  that  after 
such  a  beginning  critical  appreciation  is  impos- 
sible,—  the  roses  bloom  too  aggressively  by  the 
not  at  all  calm  Bendemeer  when  it  is  read  again, 
and  the  pathetic  and  egotistic  fallacies  hide  the 
truth  from  sight.  If  it  were  so,  it  were  little 
use  attempting  to  "  correct  impressions  "  in  this 
or  any  similar  matter.  But  I  do  not  think  so 
meanly  of  the  human  intellect.  There  is  prac- 
tically nothing  for  which  it  is  impossible  to 
"  allow,"  nothing  which  may  not  be  "  ruled 
out."  And  though  I  feel  that  the  maroons 
and  the  memories  would  make  me  a  shame- 
fully biassed  judge  of  Mr.  Swinburne  person- 
ally, that  I  should  if  I  were  on  a  jury  let  him 
off  on  any  accusation,  and  if  I  were  a  judge 
give  him  the  smallest  possible  sentence  the 
law  allowed,  a  critical  opinion  of  his  works  is 
a  different  matter.  Everybody  must  keep  a 
conscience   and  mind   it  somewhere;   and,  for 


Mr.  Swinburne.  6^ 

my  part,  I  pride  myself  on  keeping  and  mind- 
ing it  here. 

Yet  I  have  no  hesitation  in  saying  that  after 
these  years  I  find  myself  disposed  to  alter  very 
little  of  the  estimate  which  I  made  of  the 
"  Poems  and  Ballads  "  as  we  read  them  "  midst 
triptychs  and  Madonnas,"  as  another  poet  sings, 
on  that  November  Sunday.  Mr.  Swinburne 
has  done  a  very  great  deal  of  work  since,  and 
I  suppose  not  his  wildest  admirer  would  main- 
tain that  it  has  all  or  most  of  it  been  at  the 
level  of  the  best  parts  of  the  "Poems  and 
Ballads."  There  are  even,  I  believe,  as  there 
usually  are,  archaics  in  Swinburnianism  who 
hold  that  it  has  never  been  really  merry  since 
"Atalanta"  itself;  and,  on  the  other  hand, 
there  are  more  sober  Swinburnians  who  per- 
haps question  whether  the  poet's  very  best  has 
been  seen  except  at  intervals  and  in  some- 
what small  proportion  since  the  second  "  Poems 
and  Ballads"  of  1878.  Nor  is  it  necessary  to 
spend  much  time  in  displaying  the  faults  of 
this  most  captivating  of  the  poets  of  the  second 
half  of  the  nineteenth  century  in  England.     The 


64  Corrected  Impressions. 

danger  of  them,  and  to  some  extent  the  damage 
of  them,  was  seen  in  his  very  earliest  work. 
The  astonishing  fertility  of  his  command  of 
language  and  of  metre,  the  vast  volume  and 
variety  of  his  verbal  music,  were  almost  peril- 
ously near  to  "carrying  him  away"  then,  and 
no  doubt  have  more  and  more  actually  done 
so.  I  do  not  think  that  Mr.  Swinburne  has 
ever  written  a  single  piece  of  verse  that  can  be 
called  bad,  or  that  does  not  possess  qualities 
of  poetry  which  before  his  day  would  have 
sufficed  to  give  any  man  high  poetical  rank. 
But  he  has  always  wanted  discipline  who  never 
wanted  music  or  eloquence ;  and  the  complaint 
that  his  readers  sometimes  find  themselves 
floating  on  and*  almost  struggling  with  a  cata- 
ract of  mere  musical  and  verbal  foam-water 
is  not  without  foundation.  Of  late  years,  too, 
his  extraordinary  command  of  metre  has  led 
him  to  make  new  and  ever  new  experiments 
in  it  which  have  been  too  often  mere  tours  de 
force,  to  plan  sea-serpents  in  verse  in  order 
to  show  how  easily  and  gracefully  he  can  make 
them  coil   and   uncoil   their  enormous   length, 


Mr.    Swinburne.  S^ 

to  build  mastodons  of  metre  that  we  may- 
admire  the  proportion  and  articulation  of  their 
mighty  limbs.  In  other  words,  he  has  some- 
times, nay,  too  often,  forgotten  the  end  while 
exulting  in  his  command  of  the  means. 

And  yet,  if  we  take  the  very  latest  of  his 
works,  how  vast  an  addition  to  the  possibilities 
of  poetical  delight  do  we  see  in  it  when  com- 
pared with  what  English  readers  already  had 
forty  years  ago,  or  even  thirty!  Although 
Mr.  Swinburne's  indebtedness  to  the  late  Laure- 
ate is  of  course  immense,  as  must  have  been 
that  of  any  man  born  when  he  was  born,  it 
happened  most  fortunately  that  his  natural 
genius  inclined  him  to  the  mode  exactly 
opposite  to  Tennyson's.  I  have  already  en- 
deavoured to  show  in  these  papers  that, 
though  that  great  poet  could  sing  in  divers 
tones,  he  always  most  inclined,  and  was  most 
happily  inspired  when  he  did  incline,  to  the 
mode  of  slow  and  languid  singing.  Mr.  Swin- 
burne's most  natural  gift  is  exactly  the  other 
way.  His  muse  can  "  toll  slowly "  when  she 
chooses;  but  she  has  always  an  impulse  to 
5 


66  Corrected  Impressions. 

quicken,  and  is  almost  always  happiest  in  quick 
time.  Take,  for  instance,  that  famous  poem  al- 
ready referred  to,  the  great  "Atalanta"  chorus. 
It  is  stately  enough,  and  certainly  not  very 
frolic  in  tone.  But  what  a  race  and  rush  there 
is  about  it!  What  a  thunder  and  charge  of 
verse!  It  is  almost  impossible  even  to  read 
it  slowly.  Take  again  the  not  less  exquisite 
song  in  "  Chastelard,"  "  Between  the  sundown 
and  the  sea."  Here  there  is  an  appearance 
of  languor;  there  are  no  trisyllabic  feet,  none 
of  the  extraneous  aids  to,  or  signs  of,  rhythmi- 
cal speed.  And  yet  the  measure  hurries  rather 
than  lags,  the  rhymes  seem  to  invite  each  other 
to  respond  and  speed  the  response,  the  begin- 
nings of  the  lines  catch  up  and  send  on  the 
ends,  the  ends  generate  fresh  beginnings  almost 
before  they  have  ceased.  So  in  the  two  mag- 
nificent pieces  that  come  almost  on  the  thresh- 
old of  the  "Poems  and  Ballads"  the  same 
irrepressible  impulse  may  be  observed.  The 
quatrain  in  which  "  Laus  Veneris  "  is  written 
is  one  of  the  least  lightly  moving  in  appear- 
ance of  all  English  measures,  and  yet  it  too 


Mr.  Swinburne.  67 

grows  tumultuous ;  while  the  intricate  and  mas- 
sive stanza  of  "  The  Triumph  of  Time  "  swells 
and  swings  hke  a  wave. 

In  these  cases  the  poet's  idiosyncrasy  is  to 
some  extent  working  against  and  subduing 
forms  which  do  not  lend  themselves  readily 
to  it  But  where  the  forms  are  congenial,  the 
effect  is  too  remarkable  to  have  escaped  even 
the  most  careless  remark:  and  these  pieces 
have  in  consequence  supplied  the  most  popu- 
lar if  not  the  most  characteristic  of  Mr. 
Swinburne's  poems.  In  that  wonderful  metre 
of  "  Dolores "  and  the  Epilogue  to  the  first 
"  Poems  and  Ballads "  which  Mr,  Swinburne 
adapted  from  Praed  by  shortening  the  last  line, 
"the  sound  of  loud  water"  and  "the  flight 
of  the  fires"  both  embody  themselves  in 
words.  The  mighty  rush  of  the  "  Hymn  to 
Proserpine,"  the  galloping  charge  of  the  "  Song 
in  Time  of  Revolution,"  the  dancing  measures  of 
"  Rococo,"  and  many  others,  attain  what,  speak- 
ing in  jargon,  one  might  call  the  maximum 
velocity  of  any  British  poet.  It  is  sometimes, 
as,  for  instance,  in  "  A  Song  in  Time  of  Revo- 


68  Corrected  Impressions. 

lution,"  very  nearly  impossible  to  make  speech 
accompany  the  words  at  the  rate  which  seems 
as  if  it  were  required.  You  gabble  and  stumble 
in  trying  to  keep  up  with  the  poet's  speed. 
And  by  degrees  Mr.  Swinburne  developed  and 
perfected  that  faculty  of  his  which  has  been 
already  noticed,  —  the  faculty  of  arranging  his 
measures  in  a  sort  of  antiphony,  where,  as  in 
very  quick  chanting,  the  alternate  lines  seem 
to  catch  up  their  forerunners  almost  before 
these  have  finished. 

The  two  best  examples  of  this  curious  gift 
known  to  me,  and  two  of  the  very  best  things 
he  has  ever  done,  are  the  poems  in  the  second 
volume  of  "  Poems  and  Ballads,"  entitled  "  At 
a  Month's  End  "  and  the  "  Dedication  to  Cap- 
tain Richard  Burton."  I  have  sometimes  had  a 
fancy  that  I  should  like  to  hear 

"  The  night  last  night  was  strange  and  shaken. 
More  strange  the  change  of  you  and  me, 

Once  more  for  the  old  love's  love  forsaken 
We  went  down  once  more  towards  the  sea'' 

with  these  unmatched  passages  which  follow  the 
lines. 


Mr.  Swinburne.  69 


"  j4s  a  star  sees  the  sun  and  falters, 
Touched  to  death  hy  diviner  eyes, 
j4s  on  the  old  gods'  untended  altars 

The  old  fire  of  withered  worship  dies," 

sung  by  alternate  semi-choruses,  the  second 
tripping  up  the  first  a  little.  Nor  is  such  a 
motion  as  this, 

"  Nine  years  have  risen  and  eight  years  set 
Since  there  by  the  well-spring  our  bands  on  it  met," 

to  be  found  anywhere  in  English  poetry  earlier. 
The  verse  does  not  merely  run,  it  spins,  gyrat- 
ing and  revolving  in  itself  as  well  as  proceeding 
on  its  orbit:  the  wave  as  it  rushes  on  has 
eddies  and  backwaters  of  live  interior  move- 
ment. All  the  metaphors  and  similes  of  water, 
light,  wind,  fire,  all  the  modes  of  motion,  inspire 
and  animate  this  astonishing  poetry. 


VIII. 

MR.  SWINBURNE  (concluded^ 

NOW  if  there  is  any  truth  in  the  view  which 
was  given  in  the  last  paper  of  Mr.  Swin- 
burne's poetical  virtue,  it  will  be  seen  at  once 
that  there  is  a  special  danger  of  uncritical 
admiration  of  him.  The  charm  of  the  latest  — 
let  us  hope  not  the  last — of  the  Laureates  is 
not  an  impetuous  charm :  it  does  not  take  you 
by  a  coup  de  main;  but  it  never  lets  you  go 
when  it  has  once  taken  you.  Has  this  other 
kind  of  poetical  assault,  this  ivresse  de  M. 
Swmburne,  (to  borrow  the  phrase  ivresse  de 
Victor  Hugo  which  was  long  ago  used  of  the 
great  French  poet  who  was  the  God  of  Mr. 
Swinburne's  idolatry,)  the  opposite  defect  of 
its  opposite  quality?  Does  it  hold  you  with  a 
grasp  as  insecure  as  the  first  onset  of  it  is  tem- 
pestuous? Is  Mr.  Swinburne  a  poetical  Prince 
Rupert?     There  are  some  who  say  so.     I  seem 


Mr.  Swinburne.  71 

to  remember  words  of  a  very  distinguished  per- 
son, my  own  contemporary,  about  a  man's 
"  forgetting  the  Poems  and  Ballads  he  used  to 
spout."  All  I  can  say  is  that  I  myself  do  not 
do  anything  of  the  kind.  There  are,  as  I  take 
it,  three  kinds  of  literary  lovers,  as  perhaps  of 
other.  There  are  those  who  only  love  one  or  a 
very  few  things  and  cleave  to  it  or  them.  Per- 
haps this  is  the  most  excellent  way,  though  I 
own  I  do  not  think  so.  There  are  the  incon- 
stants  who  love  and  who  ride  away.  And  there 
are  those  who  are  polygamous  but  faithful; 
that  is  to  say,  who  constantly  add  to  their  loves, 
but  never  drop,  forget,  or  slight  the  old.  I 
boast  myself  to  be  of  the  last.  In  fact,  why 
should  a  rational  lover  of  poetry  ever  tire  of 
Mr.  Swinburne?  That  poet  may  have  done 
things  not  wholly  worthy  of  him,  but  no  one  is 
obliged  to  read  them.  He  may  have,  even  in 
his  best  things,  been  sometimes  led  astray  by 
want  of  judgment  in  politics  or  religion  or 
philosophy,  by  undue  flux  of  language  or  of 
verse.  But  these  things  can  be  ignored  or 
skipped.     The  virtue  of  the  virtuous  part  re- 


72  Corrected  Impressions. 

mains  ;  and  I  dare  swear  that  it  will  be  found  at 
the  second  reading  and  the  tenth  and  the  hun- 
dredth as  distinct  as  at  the  first  by  those  who 
can  get  beyond  and  above  mere  novelty. 

It  is,  if  not  the  most  philosophical,  one  of  the 
most  effectual  of  tests  to  consider  a  very  strong 
literary  mannerism  or  manner  in  its  imita- 
tions. Mr.  Swinburne,  Heaven  knows,  has  been 
imitated  enough.  Kingsley  says  somewhere 
that  Amyas  Leigh's  companions  proved  the 
presence  of  mosquitoes  on  the  Magdalena  "  as 
well  as  wretched  men  could."  Reviewers  did 
the  same  with  the  influence  of  Mr.  Swinburne. 
For  years  his  metres,  his  phrasing,  his  alliter- 
ation, his  repetition  of  words,  were  the  very 
cophinus  and  fcsnwn  of  the  poetaster,  the  sole 
equipment  and  furniture  with  which  he  started 
his  dreadful  trade.  And  did  one  poetaster  or 
poet  during  all  these  years  achieve  anything 
with  them  that  was  not  either  designed  or  un- 
conscious parody  and  that  was  worth  anything? 
Not  one  stanza,  not  one  line.  Some  of  the 
designed  parodies  were  very  funny;  some  of 
the  undesigned  ones  funnier  still.     But  that  is  a 


Mr.  Swinburne.  73 

proof  of  excellence,  not  of  inferiority.  It  is 
when  a  thing  is  imitable,  not  when  it  is  paro- 
diable,  that  it  stands  confessed  as  second-rate. 
And  Mr.  Swinburne,  like  other  poets  on  the 
right  side  of  the  line,  is  not  imitable,  —  at  any 
rate,  he  has  not  been  imitated.  They  have 
gotten  his  fiddle  but  not  his  rosin:  they  can 
pile  on  alliteration,  and  be  biblical  in  phrase, 
and  trench  on  things  forbidden  in  subject,  and 
make  a  remarkably  dull  Italian  into  a  god, 
and  a  great  but  not  rationally  great  Frenchman 
into  a  compound  of  Shakespeare  and  Plato. 
They  can  write  lines  in  twenty-seven  syllables 
or  thereabouts  if  necessary ;  but  they  can't  write 
poetry.     Mr.  Swinburne  can  and  does. 

There  are,  no  doubt,  several  differences  be- 
tween poetical  and  other  intoxication,  but  per- 
haps the  chief  difference  is  this.  You  can  test 
the  strength  of  the  liquids  odious  to  Sir  Wilfred 
Lawson  in  two  ways,  —  by  dipping  a  Sykes's 
hydrometer  in  them,  or  by  actually  imbibing  and 
waiting  to  see  whether  they  "  get  you  forrarder." 
In  the  case  of  poetry,  only  the  latter  test  is  avail- 
able :  you  are  yourself  the  hydrometer.     Conse- 


74  Corrected  Impressions. 

quently  it  is  exceedingly  difficult  to  refer  matters 
to  any  common  standard.  "  This  is  this  to  me 
and  that  to  thee."  And  it  is  nowhere  so  difficult 
as  in  the  case  of  a  poet  like  Mr.  Swinburne,  whose 
poetical  appeal  consists  wholly  or  mainly  in  this 
quality  of  impassioning  and  exhilarating.  He 
does  not  tell  a  story  very  well ;  his  strictly  dra- 
matic faculty  is  not,  I  think,  put  by  better  judges 
of  drama  than  I  am  very  high.  He  is  not  a 
poetical  schoolman  and  a  poetical  satirist  like 
Dryden,  nor  a  poetical  epigrammatist  and  con- 
versationalist like  Pope.  What  is  more  remark- 
able considering  his  century,  he  is  not  by  any 
means  consummate  or  even  eminent  as  a  painter 
in  words.  His  sea-pieces  put  aside,  it  may  be 
said  of  his  descriptions  that,  beautiful  as  they  are, 
they  are  rather  decorative  or  conventional  than 
strictly  pictorial,  they  do  not  bring  the  actual 
sights  before  the  eyes  with  the  simple  force  of 
Tennyson,  or  with  the  elaborate  and  complex 
force  of  Rossetti  and  Mr.  Morris.  What  he  is 
first  of  all  is  an  absolutely  consummate  artist  in 
word-music  of  the  current  and  tempestuous  kind, 
and  an  unfailing  player  on  those  moods  of  passion 


Mr.  Swinburne.  75 

or  of  thought  which  are  akin  to  his  own.  And 
if  he  fails  in  either  of  these  two  branches  of  his 
appeal,  I  should  say  that  it  must  be  not  so  much 
his  fault  as  that  of  his  audience.  Music  requires 
an  ear  to  hear  as  well  as  a  voice  to  sing  it ;  and 
when  Mr.  Guppy  remarked  that  "  there  are 
chords  in  the  human  breast,"  his  aposiopesis 
might  have  been  filled  as  well  as  in  any  other 
way  by  the  words  "  which,  if  their  quality  be  not 
of  the  right  kind,  will  fail  to  respond  to  the  very 
deftest  player."  It  may  possibly  be  a  fault  of 
Mr.  Swinburne's  that  he  lends  himself  rather  ill 
to  mere  dispassionate  admiration.  I  doubt  my- 
self whether  any  poet  of  a  very  high  class  can 
be  dispassionately  appreciated :  but  certainly  he 
cannot.  You  must,  to  quote  one  of  his  own 
finest  passages,  be  somewhat  in  the  mood  to 

"  Hear  through  star-proof  trees 
The  tempest  of  the  Thj>ades" 

or  you  must  be  in  the  mood  of  reaction  after 
such  a  hearing,  in  order  to  enjoy  him  fully. 
"And  what  for  no?"  There  is  no  senaUis  con- 
ST.ltum  de  Bacchanalibus  as  far  as  books  are  con- 
cerned;  and  I  confess  a  certain  contempt  for 


76  Corrected  Impressions. 

any  one  who  cannot  get  excited  over  print  and 
paper. 

And  after  all  there  is  a  vast  residuum  when  this 
merely  personal  excitement  (which  from  my  own 
experience  I  should  say  is  quite  as  likely  to 
be  felt  a  little  before  fifty  as  a  little  after  twenty) 
has  subsided.  There  is  the  astonishing  revela- 
tion of  the  metrical  powers  of  English:  for, 
though  we  knew  them  to  be  infinite  before,  this 
of  itself  does  not  take  the  very  least  thing  off 
from  the  blush  of  each  fresh  instalment  of  the 
infinite  surprises.  There  is  the  endless  amuse- 
ment of  analysing  the  means  (as  to  a  certain 
limited  effect  is  possible)  by  which  these  musi- 
cal and  emotional  effects  are  produced.  There 
is  the  pleasure  of  tracing  what  is,  in  so  literary 
and  scholarly  a  poet  as  Mr.  Swinburne,  the 
great  and  complicated  indebtedness  to  the  mas- 
ters of  Greece  and  of  Rome,  of  Italy  and  of 
France,  but  most  of  all  to  those  of  England. 
And  there  is  what  is  most  delightful  of  all  to 
the  true  lover  of  poetry  and  literature,  the  de- 
light of  finding  out  how  much  it  is  impossible 
to  account  for. 


Mr.  Swinburne.  77 


For  to  this  we  always  come,  and  in  this  I 
believe  consists  the  greatest  and  most  lasting 
enjoyment  of  every  kind  of  beauty.  If  you  ever 
could  find  out  exactly  why  it  is  beautiful,  the 
thing  would  become  scientific  and  cease  to  be 
interesting.  But  you  cannot,  and  so  there  is  at 
once  the  joy  of  possession  and  the  ardour  of  the 
unattained.  You  read  for  the  first,  the  twentieth, 
or  the  hundredth  time  "  The  Garden  of  Proser- 
pine," or  "  Ilicet,"  or  "  A  Wasted  Vigil."  There 
is  the  first  stage  of  pleasure,  a  purely  uncritical 
enjoyment.  Then  there  is  the  second  stage, 
in  which  you  sit  down  and  take  your  critical 
paper  and  pencil,  and  put  down:  metre  so 
much ;  alliteration  so  much ;  ingenious  disposi- 
tion of  vowel  sounds  so  much ;  criticism  of  life 
so  much;  pathetic  fancy  so  much;  to  having 
read  it  when  SHE  was  present,  or  absent,  or 
cross,  or  kind,  or  something,  so  much ;  literary 
reminiscence  so  much.  And  then  there  is  the 
third,  when  you  have  totted  these  items  up  and 
found  that  they  do  not  come  to  anything  like 
the  real  total,  that  there  is  an  infinite  balance  of 
attraction  and  satisfaction  which  you  cannot  ex- 


78  Corrected  Impressions. 

plain,  which  is  fact,  but  an  unsolved,  unanalysed, 
ultimate  fact.  The  poetry  which  has  come  to 
mean  this  to  a  lover  of  poetry  never  gets  stale, 
never  loses  charm,  never  seems  the  same,  or 
rather,  always  being  the  same  in  one  way,  is 
always  fresh  in  another. 

Among  such  poetry  I,  for  my  part,  rank  a 
very  large  proportion  of  Mr.  Swinburne's  ear- 
lier work,  and  not  a  very  little  of  his  later.  If 
it  were  ever  going  to  pall  on  me,  I  think  it 
pretty  certainly  must  have  palled  by  this  time. 
And  what  is  more,  there  is  the  comforting 
reflection  that  anything  in  which  one  has  taken 
delight  so  long  is  secure  from  palling  by  the 
very  fact.  The  accumulation  of  delighted  re- 
membrance is  a  delight  in  itself:  what  has  been 
has  been,  and  therefore  must  ever  continue  to 
be.  The  constantly  repeated  thought  and  sen- 
sation has  become  an  entity,  a  thing  in  itself,  a 
possession  for  ever,  by  the  very  dint  of  having 
been  so  long  and  so  often  possessed. 


IX.  n^''"^ 


MACAULAY. 

'TPHERE  are  not  many  deities  who  find  a 
^  place  in  every  Pantheon  or  are  represented 
by  attributes  in  every  system  of  monotheism. 
But  of  these  is  Nemesis ;  and  of  Nemesis  I  do 
not  hesitate  to  proclaim  myself  a  devout  and 
fearful  worshipper.  The  great  name  which 
stands  at  the  head  of  this  paper  is  perhaps  in 
literary  history  something  of  an  example  of 
her  power.  Such  a  hero-of-Dr.-Smiles,  such  a 
Selfelpista  (as  the  Italians  I  believe  call  it),  has 
never  been  known  since  the  lucky  literary  men 
of  the  Age  of  Anne,  whom  he  himself  described 
in  some  of  his  boldest  and  most  effective  strokes. 
Macaulay,  though  not  low-born,  was  born  quite 
in  the  middle  class ;  he  inherited  nothing  worth 
speaking  of;  and  he  did  not  devote  himself  to 
any  of  the  ordinary  paying  professions.  Whether 
—  a  circumstance  over  which  his  biographers 


8o  Corrected  Impressions. 

skim  rather  lightly  —  he  did  definitely  rat  at 
an  early  period  of  life  from  Toryism  to  Liber- 
alism does  not  very  much  matter.  He  was  born 
a  Liberal  of  the  type  which  he  was  to  do  so 
much  to  multiply  and  foster ;  and  if  his  hoisting 
of  that  flag  was  a  little  prompted  by  considera- 
tions of  probable  profit,  we  may  very  well  set 
the  thing  off  against  a  very  similar  incident  in 
the  career  of  Canning  in  the  generation  before, 
and  agree  to  say  nothing  about  it. 

From  almost  his  earliest  manhood  Macaulay's 
life  was  a  sort  of  cascade  of  fallings  on  his  feet. 
He  came  just  at  the  period  when  clear,  brilliant, 
confident,  and  rather  shallow  review-writing  was 
at  its  best  paid  and  most  honoured  apogee.  He 
came  at  the  time  when  there  were  still  rotten 
boroughs  to  bring  forward  a  young  man  of 
talent,  and  when  a  young  man  of  talent  could 
make  his  position  sure  by  denouncing  the 
rotten  boroughs  on  which  he  had  risen.  In 
the  Reform  Bill  debates  there  was  no  young 
man  of  anything  like  his  talent  on  the  other 
side,  and  the  one  young  or  youngish  man  who 
would  have  been  too   much  for  him  in  posi- 


Macaulay.  8i 

tion  and  natural  eloquence,  as  well  as  a  fair 
match  for  him  in  scholarship  and  knowledge, 
Stanley,  was  by  historical  accident  on  the  same 
side.  In  society  he  coincided  with  the  period 
of  breakfasts,  and  belonged  to  a  party  in  which 
there  was  nobody  to  match  him  as  talker 
except  Sydney  Smith,  who  was  getting  old. 
When  it  was  necessary  to  provide  for  him- 
self solidly,  the  least  troublesome  and  most 
paying  of  all  appointments  left  for  any  one  to 
obtain  came  in  his  way.  He  stayed  in  India 
long  enough  to  pick  up  a  competence  and  not 
long  enough  to  damage  his  health.  He  had  no 
tastes,  either  domestic  or  luxurious,  which  could 
interfere  with  this  independence,  or  impose  on 
him  a  longer  servitude.  He  came  home  and  set- 
tled down  to  his  own  ideal  life :  a  little  politics, 
a  great  deal  of  historical  literature,  and  as  much 
society  as  he  chose,  without  any  obligations  of 
family  estate  or  office  to  force  more  on  him. 
His  great  history  fell  on  the  very  nick  of  time 
to  suit  its  merits,  and  the  famous  twenty  thou- 
sand pound  cheque  symbolised  at  once  those 
merits  and  their  reward.     And  then  too  he  had 


82  Corrected  Impressions. 

the  crowning  felicity  of  an  opportune  death. 
Had  Macaulay  lived  to  the  age  of  Lord  Sher- 
brooke,  something  like  Lord  Sherbrooke's  fate 
might  —  indeed  I  think  must  —  have  been  his, 
though  the  few  years'  difference  between  them 
must  have  given  him  a  slight  advantage.  It  is 
almost  terrible  to  think  of  the  feelings  of  the 
man  who  prophetically  described  Mr.  Gladstone 
half  a  century  ago,  when  he  found  himself  face 
to  face  with  the  choice  of  ceasing  to  be  a  Liberal 
or  becoming  a  Gladstonian. 

Yet  Nemesis  has  been  even  with  him  (as  she 
always  is)  for  all  these  good  things,  and  for  the 
enormous  popularity  which  was  partly  their 
result  and  partly  their  complement.  Almost 
immediately  after  his  death  began  a  steady  dead 
set  of  critical  depreciation,  which,  unhasting, 
unresting,  has  attacked  him  ever  since  and  which 
for  some  years  past  has  spread  from  the  critics 
to  the  vulgar.  The  decriers  of  Macaulay  have 
been  a  strangely  miscellaneous  band.  It  was 
not  to  be  expected  that  the  Tories  whom  he 
affected  to  despise  should  like  him ;  or  that  the 
Evangelicals,  who  regarded  him  as  a  renegade. 


Macaulay.  83 

and  the  Dissenters,  who  looked  on  him  as  the 
inheritor  of  the  wicked  wit  of  Sydney  Smith, 
should  love  him.  But  he  managed  to  attract 
hosts  of  enemies  of  the  most  heterogeneous 
kinds.  It  used  to  be  a  tradition  in  Oxford  (I 
never  saw  the  passage  and  I  apologise  to  Mr. 
Smith  if  it  is  not  true)  that  Mr.  Goldwin  Smith 
even  in  the  fullest  days  of  his  Liberalism  called 
Macaulay  "  a  shallow  scoundrel."  Mr.  Matthew 
Arnold,  as  is  well  known,  exhausted  his  elegant 
quiver  on  the  "  Lays  of  Ancient  Rome,"  and  was 
evidently  often  thinking  of  Macaulay  when  he 
denounced  the  British  Philistine.  The  tribe  of 
Dryasdust  hated  him  because  he  was  not  merely 
an  omnivorous  reader  but  a  brilliant  writer ;  and 
the  devotees  of  historical  philosophy  could  not 
forgive  him  his  obstinate  superficiality  and  the 
calm  assumption  which  accompanied  it  that  there 
was  nothing  beneath  the  surface.  Although  one 
considerable  Mediaevalist,  Mr.  Freeman,  used  to 
take  his  part,  for  reasons  not  very  difficult  of 
discovery,  it  was  impossible  for  any  other  stu- 
dent of  the  older  ages  not  to  resent  the  bland 
ignoring  of  something  like  a  thousand  years  of 


84  Corrected  Impressions. 

English  history  which  made  Macaulay  constantly 
infer,  and  sometimes  almost  say,  that  nobody 
need  look  beyond  the  Great  Rebellion. 

Also  I  am  afraid  it  must  be  said,  though  it  will 
make  one  devoted  Macaulayan  who  is  a  great 
friend  of  mine  wroth,  that  the  number  of  Macau- 
lay's  enemies  in  a  certain  sense  is  sure  to  in- 
crease by  just  so  many  people  as  undertake  a 
serious  study  of  any  person  or  period  with  whom 
or  which  he  has  dealt.  It  is  the  general  if  not 
the  universal  result  in  such  cases  that  the  inquir- 
ers declare  that  Macaulay,  if  not  thoroughly  dis- 
honest, is  at  least  thoroughly  untrustworthy.  It 
is  not  that  he  is  a  partisan,  —  history  without 
partisanship  is  to  my  fancy,  in  the  old  phrase  of 
King  Henry  the  Fifth,  like  "  beef  without  mus- 
tard." Nor  is  it  that  he  is,  in  history,  deliber- 
ately unfair.  In  his  anonymous  work,  where  a 
man  ought  to  be  most  careful,  I  fear  he  some- 
times was.  Some  of  the  imputations  on  Croker 
in  the  "  Boswell "  Essay  are  utterly  inexcusable, 
even  if  we  did  not  know,  as  we  do,  that  the 
reviewer  took  up  the  book  he  intended  to  review 
with  a  determination  to  "  slate  "  it.     But  having 


Macaulay.  85 

had  occasion  to  examine  more  than  one  part  of 
the  "  History  "  carefully  and  documents  in  hand, 
I  do  not  think  that  this  sort  of  unfairness  is  often 
to  be  found  there.  Unfortunately,  another  sort 
which  is  common  in  the  "  Essays  "  is  common 
also  in  the  "  History. "  I  do  not  hold  that  Ma- 
caulay, unless  (as  in  the  Warren  Hastings  case) 
he  was  himself  misled  by  his  authorities,  ever 
advances  against  his  "  black  beasts  "  anything 
which  is  positively  untrue.  I  do  not  urge  that 
he  often  suppresses,  in  a  way  with  which  much 
fault  can  be  found,  anything  which  makes  in 
their  favour.  But  he  has  a  less  gross,  perhaps, 
but  a  worse  and  more  dangerous  fault  than  any 
of  these.  He  is  constantly  misleading  by  in- 
nuendo suggestive  of  the  false,  by  epithets,  by 
generalisations,  by  rhetorical  extensions  of  the 
actual  fact  or  text.  He  finds  in  his  document, 
let  us  say,  that  A.  on  not  certain  authority  was 
accused  on  a  particular  occasion  of  doing  or 
saying  such  and  such  a  thing.  This  trans- 
lates itself  in  the  pages  of  the  History  into 
a  general  charge  against  A.  of  being  notori- 
ously in  the  habit  of  saying  or  doing   it.     A 


86  Corrected  Impressions. 

particular  phrase  is  reported  of  a  particular 
person:  Macaulay  always  turns  it  to  "men 
began  to  say,"  or  something  of  that  kind.  In 
short,  the  most  careful  student,  the  most  expe- 
rienced critic,  never  quite  knows  where  to  have 
this  great  historian  on  a  subject  which  he,  the 
student  or  critic,  has  not  yet  examined  for  him- 
self; and  when  he  does  examine  for  himself  he 
too  often  has  to  ask  himself,  Is  it  possible  that 
these  colourings  and  baits  to  the  unwary,  these 
suppressions  by  dint  of  shading,  and  suggestions 
by  careless  scattering  of  adjectives  and  adverbs, 
can  have  been  made  without  a  deliberate  parti 
prisy  without  the  aim  of  the  advocate  whose 
admitted  and  professional  privilege  it  is  to  throw 
dust  in  the  eyes  of  the  jury  if  he  possibly  can? 

Something  else  has  to  be  added.  They  have 
made  Macaulay  into  school-books,  and  it  is  well 
known  that,  if  it  be  possible  to  instil  disgust  and 
horror  of  an  author  into  all  but  the  few  whom 
the  not  perhaps  quite  equal  Jove  of  literature 
has  specially  loved,  it  can  be  done  most  easily 
and  completely  by  setting  them  to  learn  him 
at  school. 


Macaulay.  87 

And  so  my  Lord  Macaulay  of  late  —  though 
I  do  not  know  that  the  great  heart  of  the  people 
has  yet  been  affected  about  him,  or  that  that 
Austrahan  book-shelf  of  which  we  have  all  heard 
has  yet  been  denuded  of  the  "Essays"  —  has 
begun  to  fall  rather  on  evil  days.  The  set 
against  him  has  spread  from  the  highest  to  the 
lowest  rank  of  critics ;  the  lady  novelist  has 
lifted  up  what  it  may  be  almost  improper  to 
call  her  heel  against  him;  you  see  superior 
gibes  to  his  address  in  those  curious  periodicals 
of  scraps  and  patches  which  appear  more  than 
anything  else  to  satisfy  the  literary  hunger  and 
thirst  of  the  end  of  the  nineteenth  century.  It 
is  whispered,  apropos  of  the  miserable  Mont- 
gomery, and  in  connection  with  the  present  in- 
fluentially  supported  movement  for  roasting  all 
reviewers  gratis,  that  Macaulay  was  one  of  the 
wicked  critics  who  delight  to  "slate"  good 
authors.  Fond  as  we  are  nowadays  of  rehabili- 
tations, the  rehabilitator  has  not  come  to  him. 
In  short.  Nemesis  is  upon  him:  the  deferred 
discount  of  that  twenty  thousand  pound  cheque 
has  to  be  paid,  and  it  is  heavy. 


X. 

MACAULAY  {concluded). 

T  DO  not  know  that  there  have  been  any  very 
-*-  striking  vicissitudes  in  my  own  opinions  of 
Macaulay.  I  used  to  dehght  in  the  "  Essays  " 
when  I  was  a  young  boy,  and  I  do  not  deh'ght 
in  them  much  less  now  that  I  am  neither  a  boy 
nor  young.  But  I  think  I  always  had  a  kind  of 
inkling  of  the  defects,  which  has  gained  in  pre- 
cision and  definiteness,  but  has  not,  I  think, 
deepened  much.  I  still  think  that,  on  any  sub- 
ject which  Macaulay  has  touched,  his  survey  is 
unsurpassable  for  giving  a  first  bird's-eye  view, 
and  for  creating  interest  in  the  matter.  Of  course 
for  those  readers  who  have  what  is  called  "  the 
faith  of  the  charcoal-burner,"  who  must  be  per- 
mitted to  repose  absolute  implicit  reliance  on 
every  detail  of  the  narrative,  every  clause  of  the 
creed  set  before  them,  or  who  else  will  be  mis- 


Macaulay.  89 

arable,  Macaulay  is  the  most  dangerous  of  all 
possible  guides.  But  it  must  be  an  exceedingly- 
moderate  intelligence  which  does  not  pretty 
quickly  perceive  the  classes  and  kinds  of  subject 
on  which  he  is  to  be  taken  with  grains  of  salt, 
an  exceedingly  sluggish  and  clumsy  intellect 
which  cannot  apply  these  grains  with  sufficient 
discretion. 

And  he  certainly  has  not  his  equal  anywhere 
for  covering  his  subject  in  the  pointing-stick 
fashion.  You  need  not  —  you  had  much  bet- 
ter not  —  pin  your  faith  on  his  details,  but 
his  Pisgah  sights  are  admirable.  Hole  after 
hole  —  a  very  sieveful  of  holes  indeed  —  has 
been  picked  in  the  "  Clive "  and  the  "  Has- 
tings," the  "Johnson"  and  the  "Addison,"  the 
"  Frederick"  and  the  "  Horace  Walpole."  Yet 
every  one  of  these  papers  contains  sketches,  sum- 
maries, pricisy  which  have  not  been  made  obso- 
lete or  valueless  by  all  the  work  of  correction  in 
detail.  As  a  literary  critic,  again,  Macaulay  is 
far  from  impeccable.  His  sympathies  were  not 
very  wide,  and  they  were  apt  to  be  conditioned 
by  attractions  and  repulsions  quite  other  than 


90  Corrected  Impressions. 

literary.  Although  he  had  had  a  strictly  classi- 
cal education,  although  he  early  showed  remark- 
able mastery  of  literary  form  himself,  it  cannot 
be  said  that  this  form  was  ever  the  object  of  any 
but  a  very  subordinate  share  of  his  attention. 
It  is  amazing,  when  one  has  long  been  familiar 
with  his  essay  —  an  extremely  interesting  one  — 
on  Temple,  and  then  comes  to  be  familiar  with 
Temple's  own  work,  to  find  how  little  Macaulay 
seems  to  have  relished  or  realised  Temple's 
purely  literary  excellence.  He  was  a  good 
Italian  scholar  and  something  of  a  Dantist;  yet 
his  remarks  on  the  second  of  the  three  great 
poets  of  the  world  are  wofully  narrow  and  in- 
adequate. I  feel  morally  certain  that  he  could 
not  have  been  the  Miltonian  that  he  was  if 
Milton  had  been  a  Cavalier  and  a  Churchman ; 
and  I  doubt  whether  it  was  not  necessary  for 
him  to  make  up  his  mind  (as  he  did  on  next  to 
no  evidence)  that  Bunyan  served  in  the  Parlia- 
mentary army  before  he  could  give  a  voice  to 
his  admiration  of  "The  Pilgrim's  Progress." 
Even  when  politics  did  not  interfere,  it  is  obvi- 
ous that  his  interest  in  literature  as  a  round  of 


Macaulay.  91 

sketches  of  ethics,  of  manners,  of  political  life  in 
the  wide  sense,  altogether  overtops  his  interest 
in  it  as  literature.  On  Spenser,  he  has,  as 
everybody  knows,  fallen  into  one  of  his  rare 
blunders  of  fact.  He  had  read,  as  he  had  read 
everything,  the  minor  Elizabethans;  but  they 
excite  no  rapture  in  him.  It  is  admitted  that 
he  has  made  Bacon,  no  very  deep  metaphysi- 
cian at  best,  shallower  and  more  exoteric  still 
in  his  exposition  of  him.  It  is  "  man  in  relation 
to  the  Town  "  that  he,  like  his  beloved  Addison, 
really  cares  for. 

Enough  was  said  in  the  former  paper  on  this 
subject  of  the  defects  of  Macaulay  as  a  his- 
torian ;  and  indeed  they  are  not  deniable  by 
any  competent  judge  who  is  not  for  the  nonce 
a  mere  advocate.  But  the  merit  which  has  been 
allowed  to  his  Essays,  that  of  extraordinarily 
vivid  presentation  of  the  subject,  must  be  allowed 
here  to  a  still  greater  degree,  inasmuch  as  it  is 
shown  on  a  far  greater  scale  and  in  much  more 
diflScult  matter.  With  part  of  the  period  which 
Macaulay's  History  covers  I  happen,  as  has  been 
said,  to  have  acquainted  myself  in  considerable 


92  Corrected  Impressions. 

detail  and  by  going  to  the  original  authorities. 
Nobody  can  possibly  be  more  opposed  to 
Macaulay's  general  views  on  the  politics  of  that 
period  than  I  am.  And  yet  I  am  disposed  to 
think  and  say,  without  the  least  conscious  inten- 
tion of  paradox  and  with  much  deliberate  guard- 
ing against  it,  that  of  no  other  period  of  English 
history  does  an  idea  so  clear,  vivid,  and  on  the 
whole  accurate  exist  in  so  large  a  number  of 
people,  and  that  this  is  due  to  Macaulay.  The 
fact  is  that  the  power  of  making  historical 
periods  and  transactions  real  and  living  is  an 
exceedingly  rare  power,  and  that  Macaulay  had 
it.  Since  his  day  we  have  had  a  numerously 
attended  school  of  historians  who  have  gone 
beyond  even  Macaulay  in  book-devouring,  who 
have  as  a  rule  confined  themselves  more  than 
he  did  to  single  periods,  and  who  have  some- 
times exhausted  their  powers  of  picturesque 
writing  and  their  readers'  patience  in  severely 
accurate  detail.  Not  one  of  them,  to  my  think- 
ing, has  achieved  the  success  of  making  his 
period  living  and  actual  as  Macaulay  has.  The 
picturesque   people  hide  the  truth  with  their 


Macaulay.  9j 

flashes  and  their  flourishes.  The  Dryasdusts 
dole  it  out  in  such  cut  and  dried  morsels, 
with  such  a  lack  of  art,  such  a  tedious  tyranny 
of  document  and  detail,  that  the  wood  al- 
most literally  becomes  invisible  because  of  the 
trees. 

As  for  the  "  Lays  of  Ancient  Rome,"  and  the 
not  very  numerous  but  very  remarkable  minor 
verse  which  completes  them,  the  history  of  that 
division  of  Macaulay's  works  is  the  most  start- 
ling and  the  best  known  of  all.  When  the 
"  Lays  "  first  appeared,  they  took  the  world  by 
storm,  and  they  held  it  for  many  years  pretty 
well  unquestioned.  Nobody  in  his  senses,  of 
course,  ever  took  them  for  the  highest  poetry : 
they  cannot  in  that  respect  pretend  to  vie  even 
with  their  own  author's  curious  fragment  on 
"  The  Last  Buccaneer,"  or  his  exquisite  "  Jaco- 
bite's Epitaph."  But  in  one  of  the  kinds  of 
poetry  just  below  the  very  highest  they  ex- 
hibited accomplishment  and  mastery  quite  won- 
derful, and  gave  the  poetical  satisfaction  to 
thousands,  and  probably  millions,  who  were  not 
fitted  to  receive  it  from  higher  things.     Then 


94  Corrected  Impressions. 

arose  Mr.  Matthew  Arnold  and  denounced  them 
as  "  pinchbeck,"  and  the  large  number  of  per- 
sons who  about  five  and  twenty  years  ago  were 
convinced  that  to  get  "  culture "  you  must  go 
to  Mr.  Arnold,  at  once  echoed  "  pinchbeck," 
and  vowed  that  they  had  never  thought  them 
anything  else.  Those,  however,  who  had  not 
exactly  waited  for  Mr.  Arnold  to  form  their 
opinions  of  classical  and  romantic  perfection, 
were  not,  I  think,  much  disturbed  by  this  con- 
tempt. And  in  fact  "pinchbeck"  is  about  the 
unluckiest  epithet  that  Mr.  Arnold  could  have 
selected.  Pinchbeck  in  the  literal  sense  pre- 
tends to  be  gold,  and  pinchbeck  in  the  trans- 
ferred sense  means  anything  which  pretends 
to  be  something  it  is  not.  Now  the  "  Lays " 
pretend  to  be  nothing  that  they  are  not;  they 
aim  at  nothing  more  than  a  rattling  spirited 
presentation  in  easy  ballad  rhyme  of  pictu- 
resquely told  incidents.  There  is  no  doubt 
plenty  of  pinchbeck  in  English  verse.  There 
is  the  pinchbeck  that  imitates  Greek  tragedy 
and  the  pinchbeck  that  imitates  mediaeval  Im- 
^gcry;  there  is  pinchbeck  which  would  fain  be 


Macaulay.  95 

French  and  pinchbeck  which  would  fain  be  phi- 
losophical. I  am  not  quite  certain  that  some  of 
Mr.  Arnold's  own  verse,  exquisite  as  is  the  best 
of  it,  is  not  pinchbeck  in  its  affectation  of  a  sort 
of  pseudo-philosophic  attitude  dashed  with  scep- 
tical modernism,  and  corrected  by  classic  form. 
But  there  is  no  pinchbeck  in  the  "  Lays,"  be- 
cause there  is  no  pretence.  Gold  perhaps  they 
are  not ;  silver  I  think  they  are ;  copper  an  un- 
kind or  partial  judgment  may  call  them.  But 
not  twenty  Mr.  Arnolds  shall  ever  persuade  me 
that  they  are  base  metal,  —  metal  which  shams 
a  higher  stuff. 

I  think  the  publication  of  Sir  George  Trevel- 
yan's  excellent  life  of  his  uncle  began  a  reaction 
in  favour  of  Macaulay,  and  I  think  that  reaction, 
though  not  very  sudden  or  violent,  is  solidly 
founded  and  will  go  on.  The  pedants  indeed 
are,  I  hear,  raging  at  him  more  than  ever ;  but 
they  can  do  little  harm ;  and  the  average  half- 
educated  journalist  has  begun  to  leave  off  think- 
ing it  fine  to  sneer  at  him.  He  will  never  of 
course  regain  the  position  that  he  held  during 
the  last  decade  o^  his  own  life  and  for  a  few 


96  Corrected  Impressions. 


years  afterwards :  and  I  should  be  sorry  if  he 
did.  For  his  thought  was  no  doubt  distinctly 
born^  and  sometimes  almost  vulgar;  his  style 
was  sometimes  flashy  and  almost  always  defi- 
cient in  the  finest  distinction ;  he  was  a  terribly 
partial  historian;  and  in  every  department  of 
literature  he  was  insensible  to,  and  incapable 
of  recognising,  nuances,  half-tones,  delicate  con- 
trasts, subtle  gradations.  But  on  the  other 
hand  he  had  that  rarest  and  most  precious 
power  of  attracting  his  readers  to,  and  inter- 
esting them  in,  subjects  that  were  not  merely 
frivolous  or  ephemeral ;  his  mental  attitude  was 
sturdy,  honest,  shrewd ;  he  had  a  stout  and  no- 
ble patriotism;  his  very  partisanship,  his  very 
advocacy,  had  something  manly  and  downright 
in  its  unfeigned  and  unmistakable  character; 
and  fatiguing  as  his  "snip-snap"  sometimes 
is,  utterly  disgusting  as  are  imitations  of  it,  yet 
any  one  who  speaks  of  Macaulay's  style  with 
contempt  seems  to  me  to  proclaim  himself 
fatally  and  finally  as  a  mere  "one-eyed  man" 
in  literary  appreciation.  Of  the  merits  and 
defects  of  that  curious  generation   of  middle- 


Macaulay.  py 

class  Liberalism  which  flourished  in  England 
from  1830  to  i860,  he  is  probably  the  most 
striking  example ;  and  even  if  he  were  not  this, 
he  is  a  very  great  man  of  letters,  and  an  almost 
unsurpassed  leader  to  reading. 


XI. 

BROWNING. 

TT  7HENEVER  it  happens  to  me  to  write 
''  ^  about  Robert  Browning,  I  am  always  a 
little  apprehensive  of  the  fate  of  the  Trimmer. 
I  have  loved  and  admired  his  work  for  full  thirty 
years ;  but  I  do  not  belong  to  any  of  the  four 
parties  wherein  most  of  mankind  are  included 
as  regards  him.  There  are  those  who  were 
Browningites  from  the  first,  or  almost  the  first, 
and  have  been  faithful  all  through,  —  a  race 
now  naturally  diminishing  by  efflux  of  time. 
There  are  those  who  began  to  like  him  after 
he  himself  began  to  be  fashionable,  and  who, 
whether  they  have  gone  the  whole  way  with  the 
Browning  Society  or  not,  regard  him  as  one  of 
the  greatest  of  poets  and  philosophers.  There 
are  those  who,  from  the  sturdy  English  stand- 
point, have  always  been  unable  to  tolerate  him 
at  all,  at  whatever  time  he  was  presented  to 


Browning.  gg 

them.  And  there  are  those  who,  though  chrono- 
logically contemporaries  of  the  rage  for  him, 
either  had  other  rages  which  kept  them  from 
appreciating  him,  or  are  young  enough  (not 
necessarily  in  years)  to  think  him  already  vi'eux 
jeu.  All  these  are  more  or  less  "prevailing 
parties,"  as  Lord  Foppington  says,  and  can 
encourage  one  another  by  dint  of  fellowship. 

But  my  case  is  a  little  different.  It  so  hap- 
pened that  Browning  never  fell  in  my  way  when 
I  was  a  boy,  except  in  very  small  and  casual 
extracts.  These  I  owed,  I  think,  chiefly  to  that 
godsend  to  the  youth  of  the  late  fifties  and  early 
sixties.  Dr.  Holden's  "  Foliorum  Silvula,"  which, 
if  it  was  the  occasion  of  much  deplorable  Greek 
and  Latin  verse,  must  have  laid  the  foundation 
of  acquaintance  with  the  very  best  of  English. 
I  cannot  remember  reading  a  single  volume  of 
Browning  as  a  volume  before  I  became  an  un- 
dergraduate. But  the  collected  edition  of  his 
Poems  appeared  almost  directly  afterwards,  and 
I  got  it,  while  no  long  time  passed  before  the 
appearance  of  "Dramatis  Personse."  Then  I 
became  very  much  addicted  to  Browning,  and 


lOO  Corrected  Impressions. 

used  to  read  him  night  and  day.  I  have  never 
myself  quite  understood  what  people  meant 
and  still  sometimes  seem  to  mean  by  the  "  ob- 
scurity," the  "  difficulty  "  of  "  Sordello."  It  is 
distinctly  breathless  and  it  is  unduly  affected ; 
but  if  anybody  has  got  a  brain  at  all,  that  brain 
ought  not  to  be  very  much  exercised  in  fol- 
lowing the  fortunes  of  Sordello  and  Taurello, 
Alberic  and  Ezzelin,  Adelaide  and  the  rest.  It 
appeared  to  me  that  "  Paracelsus  "  did  n't  prove 
much,  and  like  "  Sordello  "  was  breathless,  while 
I  did  not  and  do  not  care  much  more  for  Aprile 
than  for  Paul  Dombey.  But  who  could  miss 
the  splendid,  and  for  its  date,  wholly  novel 
poetry  of  it?  The  plays  were  mainly  a  bore  — 
I  have  scarcely  ever  read  a  serious  play  younger 
than  the  seventeenth  century  that  was  not  more 
or  less  of  a  bore  to  me  —  but  there  too  the  poet 
appeared.  And  as  for  "  Men  and  Women,"  and 
the  "  Lyrics,"  and  so  forth,  there  was  no  possi- 
ble mistake  about  them,  when  they  were  at  their 
best.  I  never  loved  the  most  popular  pieces 
much.  "  Ghent  to  Aix  "  is  only  a  tour  de  force, 
and  I  can  remember  that  when  as  a  boy  I  first 


Browning.  loi 

heard  of  it  I  thought  that  the  good  man  rode  to 
Aix  in  Provence  (which  would  have  been  some- 
thing like  a  ride),  and  was  desperately  disap- 
pointed at  the  actual  achievement.  In  "  Count 
Gismond  "  there  is  a  passage  of  four  and  a  half 
lines  which  is  good  enough  for  anything,  but  the 
rest  is  no  great  matter.  "  The  Glove  "  contains 
other  lines  which  stick  in  the  memory,  but  the 
moral  is  mainly  rubbish,  and  Marot  was  a  poet. 
And  so  on  and  so  on.  But  I  had  never  read, 
and  I  have  never  read,  anything  like  even  the 
least  of  half  a  hundred  of  the  others  in  its  best 
parts.  "  Christina  "  (what  devil  ever  tempted 
Mr.  Browning  to  run  the  double  lines  of  the 
earlier  version  into  single  ones?);  "In  a  Gon- 
dola "  and  "  The  Last  Ride  together,"  which  I 
will  uphold  for  two  of  the  best  love  poems  of 
the  century,  be  the  others  what  they  may,  the 
last  named  being  perhaps  the  very  best  that  we 
have  produced  for  two  hundred  years ;  "  Mes- 
merism "  and  "  Porphyria's  Lover,"  a  pair  on 
a  plane  only  a  little  lower;  the  first  stanza  of 
"  Meeting  at  Night,"  in  which  Browning  has  for 
once  met  and  matched  his  great  contemporary 


I02  Corrected  Impressions. 

and  rival  on  his  own  ground;  the  delightful 
rococo  of  "Women  and  Roses";  yet  another 
pair,  "Life  in  a  Love"  and  "Love  in  a  Life"; 
"  Love  among  the  Ruins  "  and  "  Two  in  the  Cam- 
pagna,"  which  ought,  like  so  many  of  Brown- 
ing's poems,  to  be  taken  together ;  "  Prospice," 
great  among  the  greatest,  and  such  a  quiet 
essence  of  heroic  combativeness  that  I  never 
could  understand  how  my  friend  Mr.  Henley 
failed  to  include  it  in  his  "Lyra  Heroica"; 
"  Childe  Roland,"  best  of  its  own  class,  though 
"The  Flight  of  the  Duchess"  runs  it  hard; 
and  crowning  the  whole  "  Rabbi  ben  Ezra  " ;  — 
these  were  things  (and  I  have  not  mentioned  a 
quarter  of  my  own  favourites)  to  set  the  blood 
coursing  rarely.  And  yet,  though  I  believe  I 
love  and  loved  them  with  a  sum  that  twenty 
thousand  members  of  Browning  Societies  could 
not  make  up,  I  never  could  and  cannot  now 
call  myself  exactly  a  Browningite.  Even  then, 
even  in  his  heyday,  the  man  (it  is  surely  per- 
missible to  use  slang  of  one  who  used  so 
much)  "jawed"  at  times;  he  was  not  to  be 
depended  upon  for  certainty  of  taste  or  touch ; 


Browning.  103 

he  would  drop  hideous  negligences  or  more 
hideous  outrages  of  intention  in  the  middle  of 
a  masterpiece;  it  was  clear  that  he  wanted  to 
teach;    and  so  forth. 

The  works  which  followed  "  Dramatis  Per- 
sonae  "  were  not  very  well  suited  to  convert  a 
half-hearted  though  at  times  intense  worshipper 
of  this  kind  into  a  whole-hearted  one,  I  am 
told  that  "The  Ring  and  the  Book"  did  actu- 
ally bring  about  that  change  which  its  author 
anticipated  in  the  famous  address  to  the  British 
public  who  "  might  like  him  yet."  I  cannot  say 
that  it  brought  about  a  contrary  change  in  me. 
A  man  does  not  once  appreciate  to  the  full 
"The  Last  Ride  together,"  or  "Love  among 
the  Ruins,"  and  get  tired  of  them  afterwards. 
But  I  own  that  this  huge  poem  itself  gave  me 
little  pleasure.  Of  course  there  are  fine  things 
in  it,  and  the  traits  of  "  criticism  of  life  "  as  well 
as  the  achievements  of  poetical  expression  are 
often  admirable.  But  it  is  so  tyrannously  long 
without  any  action  ;  so  mercilessly  voluble  with- 
out much  justification  for  the  volubility  ;  it  hcis 
such   a   false    air   of   wisdom   and    philosophy 


104  Corrected  Impressions. 

which  is  after  all  not  particularly  recondite  or 
novel,  —  that  I  remember  thinking  of  "  Porphy- 
ria's  Lover,"  and  wishing  that  some  one  had 
applied  that  person's  drastic  procedure  to  the 
poet  on  his  own  principles. 

Nevertheless  I  persevered,  much  enduring, 
and  except  "Red  Cotton  Nightcap  Country," 
which  I  do  not  believe  I  have  ever  read  through 
yet,  and  "People  of  Importance,"  which  I 
missed  by  accident  and  have  never  picked  up, 
I  do  not  believe  there  is  a  volume  or  a  line  of 
Browning's  that  I  have  not  read.  It  was  tribu- 
lation mostly  in  those  days,  but  there  was 
comfort  sometimes.  "  Fifine  "  is  really  a  great 
book  (the  Browningites,  I  am  told,  do  not  like 
it),  and  there  are  gleanings  even  in  the  volumes 
where  Mr.  Browning  thought  to  make  up  for  a 
not  wholly  perfect  knowledge  of  Greek  by  call- 
ing a  Nymph  a  "  numph."  And  at  the  evening 
time  there  was  light.  Even  in  the  darkest  days 
of  the  Condones  ad  Vulgus  Browningense  ap- 
peared flashes  of  the  old  splendour,  never  seen 
on  any  other  land  or  sea;  the  final  poem  of 
"  PachJarotto  "  was  an  almost  flawless  gem,  and 


Browning.  105 

the  latest  volumes  of  all,  especially  "  Asolando," 
showed  a  wonderful  recovery.  It  was  a  case  of 
eripitur  persona^  manet  res.  The  mask  that  the 
Browning  Society  had  admired,  and  that  had 
been  constantly  touched  up  and  made  more 
mask-like  to  please  it,  fell  off,  and  Browning  — 
not  in  his  first  vigour,  not  as  when  he  wrote  "  In 
a  Gondola"  or  "After,"  but  still  Browning  — 
reappeared. 

It  is  of  course  a  very  great  misfortune  to  be 
thus  constitutionally  unable  to  be  "  in  the  tune." 
In  1863  one  ran  the  risk  of  being  thought  an 
affected  and  presumptuous  youth  for  saying 
that,  whatever  faults  "  Sordello  "  might  have,  it 
was  not  half  so  obscure  as  even  then  one  of  Mr. 
Gladstone's  speeches  was,  and  that  "The  Last 
Ride  together  "  was  worth  the  weight  of  the  lady 
and  her  lover  and  their  horses  in  gold.  In  1883 
one  ran  the  risk  of  being  dismissed  as  a  griz- 
zling fossil  because  one  failed  to  admire  volume 
after  volume  of  blank-verse  "jaw,"  where  for  the 
most  part  mannerism  took  the  place  of  thought 
and  facile  ruggedness  that  of  originality.  I  am 
not  sure  that  in  1894  the  light,  light  wheel  is  not 

\ 


io6  Corrected  Impressions. 

already  on  the  point  of  turning  again,  and  that 
anybody  who  admires  Browning  at  all  will  not 
be  soon  despised  as  something  or  other  —  it 
really  does  not  much  matter  what.  Neverthe- 
less, as  there  are  nearly  always  the  seven  thou- 
sand or  thereabouts  who  have  not  bowed  the 
knee  to  the  Baal  of  any  particular  moment, 
who  do  not  take  their  admirations  or  their  dis- 
likes at  the  stall  which  happens  to  be  prescribed 
by  fashion,  it  may  not  be  impertinent  to  ex- 
amine a  little  further  the  reasons  which  have 
made  one  person  of  the  class  a  lover  of  Brown- 
ing who  was  never  a  Browningite,  —  a  critic  of 
Browning,  who  never  would  join  in  the  cry 
about  "  harshness  "  and  "  obscurity,"  and  all  the 
rest  of  it.  If  outsiders  do  indeed  see  most  of 
the  game,  such  a  one  should  at  any  rate  have 
been  able  to  see  a  little  of  it ;  and  perhaps  even 
his  enthusiasm  may  cease  to  be  suspected  when 
it  is  taken  in  conjunction  with  his  objections. 


XII. 
BROWNING   (concluded^. 

I  DO  not  know  that  there  is  any  English 
writer  to  whom  the  motto  Qualis  ab  in- 
cepto  may  be  applied  with  more  propriety  than 
to  Robert  Browning,  —  any  whose  works  are 
more  intimately  connected  with  his  life.  I  am 
not  one  of  those  who  take  a  very  great  interest 
in  the  biography  of  poets,  and  I  think  that  its 
importance  as  illustrating  their  works  has  been 
as  a  rule  exaggerated.  But  certainly,  if  a  toler- 
ably instructed  student  of  books  and  men  were 
set  the  problem  of  Browning's  works  without 
any  knowledge  of  Browning's  life,  it  would  not 
give  him  much  trouble  to  lay  down  the  main 
lines  of  the  latter.  A  man  who  had  had  to 
write  for  a  living,  or  to  devote  himself  to  writ- 
ing in  the  intervals  of  any  regular  occupation, 
could  hardly  have  produced  so  much  and  have 
produced  it  with  such  a  complete  disregard  of 


io8  Corrected  Impressions. 

the  public  taste  and  the  consequent  chances  of 
profit.  A  man  who  had  had  the  advantages 
of  that  school  and  university  education  which 
as  a  rule  happens  to  the  upper  and  upper- 
middle  classes  of  Englishmen  would  hardly 
have  produced  his  work  with  such  an  entire 
disregard  of  authority  as  well  as  of  popularity. 
The  first  influence  was  no  doubt  wholly  good, 
for,  copy-books  notwithstanding,  the  instances 
of  men  who  without  private  means  or  practical 
sinecures  have  produced  large  quantities  of 
very  fine  poetry  are  very  rare,  and  for  the  last 
couple  of  centuries  almost  non-existent.  The 
circumstances  of  Browning's  education,  on  the 
other  hand,  no  doubt  had  a  good  influence  as 
well  as  a  bad.  It  is  open  to  any  one  to  contend 
that  his  natural  genius  was  too  irregular,  too 
recalcitrant  to  the  file,  to  have  admitted  the 
labour  of  that  instrument ;  and  that  therefore, 
if  he  had  had  a  classical  and  critical  taste  im- 
planted in  him,  the  struggle  of  the  two  would 
have  condemned  him  to  silence.  But  it  is  quite 
certain  that  his  worst  faults  are  exactly  those 
of  a   privately  educated  middle-class   English- 


Browning.  109 

man,  and  it  is  of  the  very  highest  interest  to 
compare  his  career  and  performance  in  this 
respect  with  the  career  and  performance  of 
Mr.  Ruskin,  who  was  in  many  respects  his 
analogue  in  genius  and  circumstances,  but 
whose  sojourn  at  Oxford  gave  just  the  differ- 
entiating touch. 

Allow  however,  as  we  may,  less  or  more  in- 
fluence to  these  things,  I  think  it  will  hardly 
be  denied  that  the  effect  manifested  itself  very 
early,  and  that  even  by  the  appearance  of 
"  Bells  and  Pomegranates "  prediction  of  their 
author's  characteristics  and  career  as  a  whole 
was  pretty  easy.  It  certainly  had  become  so 
by  the  time  that  I  myself,  as  I  have  said, 
was  "  entered "  in  Browning.  It  was  obvious 
on  the  credit  side  that  here  was  a  man  with 
an  almost  entirely  novel  conception  of  poeti- 
cal vocabulary  and  style,  with  a  true  and  won- 
derful lyrical  gift,  with  a  faculty  of  argument 
and  narrative  in  verse  which,  diametrically  as 
it  was  opposed  in  kind  to  the  Drydenian  tra- 
dition, had  been  in  kind  and  volume  unsur- 
passed  since   Dryden,  and  with   an  enormous 


no  Corrected  Impressions. 

range  and  versatility  of  subject.  He  could,  it 
was  clear,  not  merely  manipulate  words  and 
verse  in  a  manner  almost  suggesting  prestidigi- 
tation, but  was  also  much  more  than  a  mere 
word-  and  metre-monger.  On  certain  sides  of 
the  great  problem  of  life  he  could  think  with 
boldness  and  originality,  if  not  with  depth :  the 
depth  of  Mr.  Browning's  thought  belongs  to  the 
same  mistaken  tradition  as  his  obscurity,  and 
reminds  me  of  those  inky  pools  in  the  limestone 
districts  which  look  and  are  popularly  reputed 
to  be  bottomless  till  somebody  tries  them  and 
finds  them  to  be  about  nineteen  foot  two.  He 
had  above  all  a  command  of  the  most  univer- 
sally appealing,  if  not  also  the  loftiest,  style  of 
poetry,  —  that  which  deals  with  love,  —  hardly 
equalled  except  by  the  very  greatest,  and  not 
often  excelled  even  by  them. 

But  these  great  merits  were  accompanied 
by  uncommon  and  sometimes  very  ugly  de- 
fects. It  was  obvious  that  his  occasional  ca- 
cophonies and  vulgarities  were  not  merely  an 
exaggeration  of  his  recognition  of  the  truth 
that    the   vernacular   can    be   made  to   impart 


Browning.  iii 

vigour,  and  that  discords  and  degradations 
of  scale  and  tone  heighten  and  brighten  musi- 
cal effects.  They  were  at  any  rate  sometimes 
clearly  the  result  of  a  combination  of  indo- 
lence and  bad  taste,  —  indolence  that  would  not 
take  the  trouble  to  remove,  bad  taste  that  did 
not  fully  perceive  the  gravity  of  the  blemishes 
that  wanted  removing  in  his  very  finest  pas- 
sages. There  was  also  that  most  fatal  defect 
which  the  ill-natured  fairy  so  often  annexes 
to  the  gifts  of  vigorous  and  fertile  command 
of  language,  —  an  excessive  voluminousness 
and  volubility.  Lastly  there  was  the  celebrated 
"  obscurity,"  which  taken  to  pieces  and  judged 
coolly  was  simply  the  combined  result  of  the 
good  and  bad  gifts  just  mentioned.  Mr.  Brown- 
ing had  plenty  to  say  on  whatsoever  subject  he 
took  up ;  he  had  a  fresh,  original,  vigorous 
manner  of  saying  it;  he  was  naturally  inclined 
to  and  had  indulged  his  inclination  for  odd 
and  striking  locutions ;  he  was  very  allusive ; 
and  he  was  both  impatient  of  the  labour  of 
correction  and  rather  insensitive  to  the  neces- 
sity of  it.     Hence  what  he  himself  has  rather 


112  Corrected  Impressions. 

damagingly  called  in  a  probably  unintentional 
satire  and  caricature  of  himself  the  "  monstr' 
inform'  ingens-horrendous  demoniaco-seraphic 
penman's  latest  piece  of  graphic  "  which  occurs 
so  often  in  his  work,  which  the  admirers  take 
for  something  very  obscure  but  very  precious, 
requiring  the  aid  of  Browning  dictionaries  and 
so  forth,  which  the  honest  public  gapes  at, 
from  which  the  primmer  kind  of  academic 
critic  turns  away  disgusted,  and  which  more 
catholic  and  tolerant  appreciation  regards,  if 
not  exactly  with  disgust,  certainly  with  regret 
and  disapproval. 

Now  it  was  practically  certain  that  when,  from 
such  a  man,  the  very  last  restraining  or  dissuad- 
ing checks  in  the  shape  of  public  disapproval  or 
(more  powerful  still)  indifference  were  removed, 
he  would  take  the  bit  in  his  teeth  and  run  away 
with  himself  This  was  what  Browning  practi- 
cally did  in  the  score  of  volumes  in  improvised 
blank  verse  chiefly,  but  also  in  other  metres, 
which  he  poured  forth  after  1868.  The  greater 
part  of  this  matter  I  feel  tolerably  confident 
that   futurity  will   relegate    to  the   same   shelf 


Browning.  1 13 

with  Southey's  epics  and  Dryden's  plays.  In- 
deed, I  myself  would  much  rather  read  the 
worst  of  either  group  than  *'  Prince  Hohen- 
stiel  Schwangau,"  or  the  "Balaustion"  books. 
But  if  the  said  posterity  is  well  served  by  its 
editors,  from  time  to  time  certain  things  will 
be  rescued  from  even  this  part,  and,  added  to 
the  earlier  harvest,  will  form  a  poetical  corpus 
not  by  any  means  contemptible  in  respect  of 
bulk  even  when  ranked  with  the  sheaves  of 
pretty  fertile  poets,  and  full  of  admirable  if 
rarely  perfect  poetry.  Few  philosophical  poets 
have  lived  long  —  Lucretius  and  Dante  are 
the  only  great  exceptions  —  and  I  am  as  cer- 
tain as  it  is  not  rash  to  be  that  Mr.  Browning 
in  his  philosophical  pieces  will  not  rank  with 
these.  Indeed,  it  was  not  much  of  a  philoso- 
phy, this  which  the  poet  half  echoed  from  and 
half  taught  to  the  second  half  of  the  nineteenth 
century.  A  sort  of  undogmatic  Theism  height- 
ened by  a  very  little  undogmatic  Christianity; 
a  theory  of  doing  and  living  more  optimist 
than  Carlylism  and  less  fantastic  than  Ruskin- 
ism,  but  as  vague  and  as  unpractical  as  either ; 


114  Corrected  Impressions. 

a  fancy  for  what  is  called  analogy  and  a  mar- 
vellous gift  of  rhetorical  exposition,  —  these 
made  it  up.  It  looks  vast  enough  and  various 
enough  in  form  and  colour  at  a  distance;  it 
shrinks  and  crumbles  up  pretty  small  when 
you  come  to  examine  it. 

But  a  poet  is  always  saved  by  his  poetry, 
and  of  that,  thank  Heaven,  Mr.  Browning  had 
plenty  to  secure  his  salvation.  Those  volumes 
of  selections  by  which  in  an  even  narrower 
compass  than  that  already  hinted  at  he  is  per- 
haps destined  to  live  most  securely  and  long- 
est (though  the  second  wants  refreshing  and 
rearranging)  display  a  perfect  Aurora  Borealis 
of  poetical  flashes  of  the  intensest  luminosity 
and  the  most  endless  variety  of  colour.  The 
sabre-and-stirrup  clang  of  the  i  rhymes  in 
"Through  the  Metidja";  the  astonishingly 
various  music  and  imagery  of  the  songs  of  "  In 
a  Gondola  " ;  the  steady  hopeless  swing  —  too 
full  of  passion  for  rant —  of  "  The  Last  Ride  " ; 
the  strange  throbbing  measure  of  "  Mesmer- 
ism"; and  a  hundred  other  things  which  I 
must  not   mention  lest  after  the   string  given 


Browning.  115 

in  the  last  paper  I  be  accused  of  mere  cata- 
logue-making ;  —  these  are  the  things  which 
generation  after  generation  of  lovers  of  poetry- 
will  read  and  rejoice  in,  just  as  we  now  read 
and  rejoice  in  Donne  and  Marvell,  and  the 
rest  of  the  seventeenth  century  lyrists.  In- 
deed, I  sometimes  wonder  whether  on  one  of 
their  sides  Browning  did  not  come  nearer  to 
these  than  Coleridge  or  Shelley,  Keats  or  Ten- 
nyson. For  if  he  had  not  the  finest  seven- 
teenth century  magic  in  remoteness  of  matter 
and  melody  of  form,  he  had  the  odd  ups  and 
downs,  the  queer  admixture  of  ore  and  dross, 
the  want  of  criticism,  the  incompleteness  which 
mark  all  but  one  or  two  of  our  seventeenth 
century  men. 

And  if  any  one  must  needs,  to  complete  his 
idea  of  a  great  poet,  have  something  more  than 
poetry  and  passion,  than  music  and  moonlight, 
I  shall  at  least  allow  that  Browning's  life  philos- 
ophy, if  exposed  to  the  criticisms  made  above, 
did  once  or  twice,  notably  in  the  above-mentioned 
"  Rabbi  ben  Ezra,"  receive  a  very  noble  and 
lasting  enshrinement  and  expression.     A  little 


ii6  Corrected  Impressions. 

optimist  perhaps,  but  certainly  not  with  the 
optimism  which  blinks  the  facts  of  life ;  a  little 
pantheistic,  as  perhaps  are  all  the  great  religions 
and  all  the  great  philosophies  when  you  come 
to  examine  them  from  certain  points  of  view  and 
mood ;  a  trifle  unsubstantial,  as  divine  philoso- 
phy must  always  be.  But  full  of  a  generous 
and  indomitable  spirit,  free  from  the  whining 
and  cavilling  to  which  poetic  philosophy  so 
often  inclines  ;  throbbing  with  that  remem- 
brance of  delight  which  is  perhaps  better  than 
any  delight  itself;  not  covetous  but  not  despair- 
ing of  more ;  content  to  comprehend  as  far  as 
may  be,  to  labour  as  much  as  need  be,  to  hope 
as  much  as  is  rational,  —  the  philosophy  in  short 
of  a  poet  who  is  also  a  man,  which  duplicate 
advantage  poets  have  not  always  possessed. 


XIII. 

DICKENS. 

THERE  are  few  comparatively  recent  writers 
about  whom  it  is  more  difficult  to  write 
at  the  present  moment  than  it  is  to  write  about 
Dickens.  Current  public  opinion  about  him 
seems  to  have  got  into  a  kind  of  tangle,  and 
there  are  as  many  as  four  or  five  distinct  views 
regarding  him,  all  of  which  are  held  by  con- 
siderable parties,  each  including  some  who 
deserve  consideration  quite  independent  of  the 
numbers  of  their  companions.  There  are  — 
perhaps  least  numerous  at  the  moment,  but 
including,  I  fancy,  a  larger  genuine  number 
of  genuine  adherents  than  some  of  the  other 
parties  would  admit  —  the  old  thorough  Dick- 
ens worshippers,  who  more  or  less  represent 
the  public  that  Dickens  himself  took  by  storm. 
These  have  a  relish  for  his  fun,  and  are  not  too 
critical  over  his  pathos;  they  are  not  revolted 
by,  or  at  least  can  pardon,  and  sometimes  they 


ii8  Corrected  Impressions. 

directly  sympathise  with,  his  eccentric  and  ill- 
reasoned  politics  and  sociology;  they  do  not 
care  to  inquire  too  curiously  into  his  formal  pe- 
culiarities of  plot  and  management ;  they  do  not 
cavil  at,  perhaps  they  enjoy,  his  style.  Some 
of  them  indeed,  who  have  literary  gifts,  follow 
him  more  or  less  directly  to  this  day.  Then,  to 
take  as  nearly  as  I  can  their  chronological  suc- 
cessors, there  are  those  who,  admitting  that  he 
was  a  genius,  feeling  a  genuine  enjoyment  of  his 
humour,  and  allowing  him  a  great  amount  of 
credit  for  marvellous  inventive  power,  dwell 
strongly  on  all  the  excepted  points  just  hinted 
at,  and  in  addition  resent  not  merely  the  extraor- 
dinary topsy-turvyness  and  the  sharp  limits  of 
his  power  of  delineation  of  character,  but  also 
that  quality  in  him  which  can  only  be  called 
vulgarity,  though  I  admit  all  the  objections 
which  are  often  urged  against  the  use  of  that 
word  as  itself  vulgar.  This  class  is  not  by  any 
means  a  homogeneous  one,  and  the  degrees  in 
which  its  members  allow  the  positive  or  credit 
side  to  overcome  the  negative  or  debit  in  their 
general  estimate  are  extremely  various. 


Dickens.  119 

But  independent  of  these  two  parties,  at  least 
three  more,  among  men  mostly,  but  not  always, 
younger  than  the  members  of  the  other  two, 
admit  of  definition  more  or  less  exact.  There  , 
are  those  who  are  simply  "tired  of  Dickens," 
who  resent  the  frequency  with  which  his  char- 
acters have  passed  into  the  range  of  newspaper 
quotation  and  parallel,  who  would  like  to  "  turn 
the  page,"  who  are  in  fact  bored  by  him.  There 
is  a  still  larger  body  among  the  very  young  who 
think  him  out  of  date  in  more  than  time,  and 
who  wonder  how  anybody  can  even  think  of 
Dickens  when  he  might  read  Mr.  Hardy  and 
Mr.  Meredith.  And  there  is  a  small  body  again, 
very  heterogeneously  composed,  but  including 
some  persons  of  wit  if  also  of  crotchet,  w^ho  would 
if  they  could  exalt  Dickens  as  a  great  demo- 
cratic genius,  as  one  who  made  his  way  without 
and  in  spite  of  education,  fashion,  powerful  con- 
nections, and  so  forth,  and  vindicated  the  rights 
of  the  faculties  of  genius  pure  and  simple. 

There  is  something  of  an  egg-  or  sword- 
dance  in  the  attempt  at  a  criticism  of  Dickens 
amid   these  delicate  and  dangerous  differences 


I20  Corrected  Impressions. 

of  opinion.  But  perhaps  we  shall  find  that  ad- 
herence to  the  personal  and  historical  side  of 
the  matter  here,  as  elsewhere,  will  help  us  not  a 
little.  It  has,  I  believe,  been  held  by  the  fanciful, 
that  a  man  of  tolerably  healthy  mind,  who  does 
not  allow  himself  to  be  hampered  by  prejudice 
or  crotchet,  usually  goes  through  a  kind  of  mi- 
crocosm of  all  possible  opinions  about  his  sub- 
ject; and  though  this  may  be  something  of  an 
exaggeration,  it  is  also  something  of  a  truth. 

I  began  myself  very  young  (at  ten  or  twelve 
years  old,  I  should  think)  with  "  Pickwick," 
and  I  own  that  I  should  not  to  this  day  think 
much  of  any  one  who  began  at  about  that  age 
with  "  Pickwick "  and  did  not  adore  it.  I  will 
add,  that  I  should  not  think  very  much  of  any- 
one who  materially  altered  his  opinion  of  "  Pick- 
wick," however  many  years  he  might  live  and 
however  many  times  he  might  read  it  afterwards. 
Years  will  indeed  bring  the  philosophic  mind  to 
this  extent,  that  one  perceives  more  and  more 
the  extremely  artificial  character  of  the  Pick- 
wickian world.  But  then  a  boy  does  not  take  the 
Pickwickian  world  for  a  natural  one.    He  simpljj 


Dickens.  121 

does  not  think  of  it  either  as  natural  or  unnat- 
ural; and  when  the  sense  of  its  artificiality 
comes  on  him,  it  destroys  nothing,  it  brings 
about  no  disillusion,  it  only  adds  a  certain  con- 
dition to  his  view.  I  do  not  think  that  to  this 
day  I  ever  allow  more  than  a  year  or  two  to 
pass  without  reading  "  Pickwick  "  through  from 
beginning  to  end ;  and  I  cannot  perceive  any 
marked  diminution  in  the  satisfaction  with  which 
I  do  so.  As  Mr.  Boswell,  in  one  of  his  inimit- 
able compromises  between  the  simpleton  and 
the  sage,  somewhere  remarks,  "  I  seldom  expe- 
rience less  disappointment  in  any  scheme  of 
happiness  I  trace  out."  And  this,  I  think,  is 
the  very  hardest  test  to  which  anything,  literary 
or  other,  can  be  put.  It  is  all  very  well  to  say 
that  youthful  enjoyment  induces  a  strong  delu- 
sion, and  that  we  rather  refuse  to  acknowledge 
a  diminution  than  actually  experience  an  equal- 
ity. If  this  be  so,  why  do  other  things  in  which 
I  used  to  take  quite  as  much  delight  as  in  *'  Pick- 
wick" fail  to  give  me  the  same  pleasure  now? 
No;  I  shall  maintain  that  this  impossible  and 
burlesque   epopee   of    the   four    friends   has   a 


122  Corrected  Impressions. 

quality  in  it  which  belongs  only  to  the  literature 
which  is  pre-eminently  good  in  a  kind  just  short 
of  the  highest. 

But,  it  will  be  said,  "  Pickwick  "  is  not  all 
Dickens,  and  all  Dickens  is  not  "  Pickwick," 
both  of  which  propositions  are  most  undeniably 
true.  In  leaving  them  one  leaves  the  only  spot 
of  ground  in  the  subject  where  a  perfectly  fair 
and  equal  fight  is  possible  between  admirers 
and  contemners.  You  like  "  Pickwick"  or  you 
do  not,  and  there 's  an  end  on 't.  Except  as 
regards  some  of  the  inserted  stories,  it  is  all  of 
a  piece.  But  this  could  never  be  said  again  of 
any  of  the  author's  later  works.  I  am  not  old 
enough  to  have  been  contemporary,  at  least  in 
a  state  of  intelligence,  with  any  of  the  greater 
of  these  as  they  are  generally  reckoned.  I  do, 
indeed,  remember  seeing  the  parts  of  "Bleak 
House  "  in  the  booksellers'  windows ;  but  I  did 
not  read  it  till  long  after.  I  remember  distinctl}- 
failing  to  appreciate  *'  Hard  Times,"  which  I 
think  rather  better  of  now;  and  "A  Tale  of 
Two  Cities,"  which  I  like  worse  every  time  I 
manage  to  read  it.     Of  "  Great  Expectations  " 


Dickens.  123 

I  thought  as  a  boy,  and  I  think  as  a  man,  much 
better  than  most  people  did,  or  I  beheve  do : 
and  though  I  cannot  believe  that  we  lost  much 
by  the  non-completion  of  "  Edwin  Drood,"  there 
is  no  doubt  "  the  true  Dickens  "  in  parts  of  "  Our 
Mutual  Friend."  But  for  that  true  Dickens  in 
its  quiddity  we  must  no  doubt  look  farther  back 
even  than  "  Bleak  House,"  He  achieved  indeed 
in  the  latter  days  with  Louisa  and  Estella  some- 
thing more  like  live  girls  than  the  wax  models 
which  under  the  names  of  Rose  Maylie  and 
Kate  Nickleby,  and  so  forth,  he  had  been  con- 
tented to  exhibit  in  the  earlier.  The  life  phi- 
losophy of  "  Great  Expectations,"  though  not 
very  extensive  or  thorough,  is  the  sanest  and 
the  truest  he  has  expressed.  The  dreary  man- 
nerism which  appears  in  "  Bleak  House,"  which 
simply  floods  "Little  Dorrit"  and  "  Hard  Times," 
and  which  seldom  retires  for  long  in  any  of  the 
later  books,  is  relieved  by  Mr.  Guppy  and  his 
friends,  by  Afifery  Flintwinch,  by  Jo  Gargery 
and  by  Herbert  Pocket,  by  the  dolls'  dress- 
maker, by  a  dozen  other  persons  and  a  thousand 
or  a  myriad  touches  and  flashes.     But  when  we 


124  Corrected  Impressions. 

think  of  Dickens  and  do  not  think  of  "  Pick- 
wick "  only,  we  do  not  think  of  these.  It  was 
in  the  forties  and  earhest  fifties  that  he  made 
his  fame  with  "Nickleby"  and  "The  Old  Curios- 
ity Shop,"  with  "  Barnaby  Rudge  "  and  "  Martin 
Chuzzlewit,"  with  "  Copperfield  "  and  "  Dom- 
bey,"  and  it  is  with  these  that  he  must  keep  or 
lose  it. 

And  yet  how  difficult  it  is  to  arrive  at  any 
settled  and  connected  view,  much  more  at  any 
view  that  shall  command  anything  like  a  general 
assent  about  even  these  books  !  In  looking,  for 
instance,  for  a  date  just  now,  I  found  in  a  most 
respectable  book  of  reference  the  statement  that 
"  Agnes  is  perhaps  the  most  charming  character 
in  the  whole  range  of  fiction."  Agnes!  No 
decent  violence  of  expletive,  no  reasonable  arti- 
fice of  typography,  could  express  the  depths  of 
'.my  feelings  at  such  a  suggestion.  It  is  an  ob- 
'  servation  almost  too  hackneyed  to  be  repeated 
that  our  fathers  thought  Little  Nell  and  Lit- 
tle Paul  almost  excruciatingly  pathetic,  while 
the  whole  of  my  own  generation  has  chiefly 
yawned  over  them.     I  am  told  that  the  weeping 


Dickens.  125 

time  is  coming  again  soon;  but  this  I  take 
leave  to  doubt.  As  a  terrorist  and  a  manufac- 
turer of  Villains  with  a  capital  V,  Dickens  has 
I  believe  from  the  first  been  exposed  to  the 
doubts  and  sneers  of  callous  heretics.  Marks 
and  Ralph  Nickleby,  Barnaby  Rudge's  rather 
incomprehensible  and  very  murderous  father, 
Jonas  Chuzzlewit,  Carker  the  impossible,  have 
never  had  the  first  good  fortune  of  Paul  and 
Nell,  though  they  have  fully  shared  their  later 
decadence. 

And  the  case  of  the  novelist's  social  satire 
is  not  very  different.  Dickens  was  so  essen- 
tially the  middle-class  Englishman  of  his  own 
generation  plus  genius,  that  he  could  not  fail  to 
carry  great  numbers  of  his  readers  with  him  in 
his  onslaughts  on  workhouses  and  public  offices, 
on  Chancery  and  the  manufacturing  system. 
But  some  at  least  of  those  readers  would  have 
been  abnormally  stupid  if  they  had  not  per- 
ceived from  the  first  the  exaggeration  and  the 
one-sidedness  which  pervaded  these  attacks,  and 
the  astonishingly  vague  and  unpractical  char- 
acter of  the  optimism  which  inspired  such  alter- 


126  Corrected  Impressions. 

natives  as  the  novelist  suggested  or  seemed  to 
suggest.  Reading  in  parts  might  obscure  the 
frequent  incoherence  and  improbability  of  the 
stories.  But  except  among  those  readers  who 
had  themselves  no  more  knowledge  of  the  sub- 
ject than  their  author,  it  was  impossible  that 
many,  even  from  the  first,  should  not  be  struck 
with  the  almost  inconceivable  ignorance  of  all 
the  upper  and  a  large  part  of  the  middle  class 
of  society  which  his  books  displayed.  The  so- 
called  lower  classes  and  part  of  the  shop-keeper 
rank  he  knew,  as  the  French  say,  "  like  his 
hand."  Of  actors  he  could  tell  and  of  attorneys, 
and  he  knew  a  barrister  in  court,  though  hardly 
out  of  it.  But  his  soldiers,  I  mean  his  soldier- 
officers,  his  clergymen,  his  scholars,  his  miscel- 
laneous gentlemen,  much  more  his  baronets  and 
his  peers,  were  like  nothing  that  lives  and  moves 
on  any  part  of  the  earth  except  the  boards  of 
the  stage.  And  so  from  the  very  earliest  times 
there  was  dissidence  about  him,  dissidence  from 
which  I  must  if  I  can  in  another  paper  endeav- 
our, if  not  to  extract  some  argument,  at  any 
rate  to  make  clear  my  own  view. 


XIV. 

DICKENS  {concluded^. 

T  REMEMBER  reading  a  good  many  years 
-■■  ago,  in  a  description  (doubtless  intended  to 
be  sarcastic)  of  an  academic  critic  by  a  critic 
who  was  not  academic,  the  item,  "  He  likes  the 
fun  of  Dickens."  A  person  who  only  "  liked 
the  fun  of  Dickens,"  it  was  hinted  (indeed  I  am 
not  sure  that  it  was  not  subsequently  inculcated 
explicitly),  was  a  nasty  cynic,  a  superfine  and 
unsympathetic  disdainer  of  pathos  and  popular 
sentiment.  I  am  afraid  that  I  underlay  then, 
and  must  still  underlie,  the  ban  of  this  condem- 
nation. I  should  indeed  not  be  disposed  to 
deny  now  that  Dickens  has  other  claims  besides 
mere  fun.  I  say  "  now,"  because  there  was  a 
period  when  I  was  younger  and  more  unbal- 
anced in  judgment,  and  when,  reserving  appre- 
ciation of  "  Pickwick  "  and  the  Pickwickian  parts 


128  Corrected  Impressions. 

of  its  fellows,  I  was  disposed  to  place  their  au- 
thor unduly  low.  At  this  period  I  once  sold  a 
complete  set  of  the  paper-bound  issue  of  the 
works  which  came  out  in  the  late  sixties  for  half 
a  crown,  —  ostensibly  and  to  some  extent  really 
as  a  testimony  of  opinion  as  to  the  literary 
value  of  the  matter.  This  was  fantastic,  if  not 
positively  foolish ;  but  it  was  even  at  the  time 
not  quite  sincere,  and  such  sincerity  as  there 
was  in  it  vanished  very  soon. 

What  may  be  said,  I  think  with  perfect  criti- 
cal truth,  about  Dickens  is,  that  although  he  has 
a  good  deal  besides  "  his  fun,"  nothing  that  he 
has  is  of  unalloyed  excellence  except  that  fun. 
I  have  seen  him  praised  for  wit ;  but  I  should 
say  that  when  he  is  really  funny  he  is  always 
humourous,  but  never  witty.  When  he  attempts 
wit  it  is  apt  to  land  him  in  the  dreary  regions  of 
the  Circumlocution  Office  and  other  dry  places 
wherein  an  over-strained  satire  prowls  and  barks. 
But  in  his  own  region  of  partly  observed,  partly 
exaggerated  humour  of  the  fantastic  kind,  his 
felicity  is  astonishing.  Although  his  subjects 
are  often  technically  "  low  "  enough  in  all  con- 


Dickens.  129 

science,  he  never  here  deserves  the  epithet 
"  vulgar  "  from  those  who  know  how  to  use  that 
dangerous  adjective.  It  is  only  when  he  ap- 
proaches the  delineation  of  gentility  or  attempts 
the  attitude  of  philosophic  satire  that  he  exhibits 
traces  of  the  one  unpardonable  thing ;  and  his 
vulgarest  book,  his  one  book  tainted  with  in- 
curable and  hopeless  vulgarity,  is  his  "  Child's 
History  of  England." 

But  though  this  terrible  fault  —  a  fault  awkward 
to  speak  of  inasmuch  as  the  mere  mention  of  it 
infuriates  those  who  do  not  themselves  feel  its 
presence  — does  exist  in  Dickens  to  a  most 
unpleasant  extent,  the  strange  alloy  which,  as 
has  been  noted,  pervades  all  his  work  except 
that  in  pure  fantastic  humour,  is  by  no  means 
wholly  due  to  it.  The  cause  thereof,  however, 
is  perhaps  something  which  aggravated  his  vul- 
garity, to  wit,  his  unfortunate  want  of  early 
education  and  training  except  of  the  most  hap- 
hazard and  self-helping  kind.  He  appears  to 
have  been,  as  an  editor,  an  extremely  severe 
critic  of  other  men's  work,  and  he  certainly  did 
not  take  his  own  lightly.     Yet  he  seems  to  have 

9 


130  Corrected  Impressions. 


been  more  destitute  of  the  faculty  of  self-criti- 
cism than  any  person  of  whom  I  can  think  who 
possessed  anything  like  his  powers  of  creation. 
It  is  evident  from  the  storm  passage  in  "  David 
Copperfield,"  and  some  others,  that  he  was  quite 
capable  of  writing  a  kind  of  half  sober,  half 
ornate,  and  distinctly  old-fashioned  style,  which 
has  very  considerable  merit  and  is  not  justly 
exposed  to  any  reproach  on  the  score  of  taw- 
driness,  want  of  elegance,  or  absence  of  propor- 
tion. Yet  for  once  that  he  will  content  himself 
with  this,  he  will  indulge  a  score  of  times  in  a 
kind  of  trumpery  strained  melodramatic  rant, 
which  is  as  little  impressive,  as  completely  dis- 
gusting, as  the  antics  of  a  North  Asian  or  North 
American  sorcerer.  He  will  spoil  the  admirable 
vigour  of  his  descriptive  faculty  at  crises  by 
plastering  and  daubing  this  rant  over  the  scenes, 
and  change  a  shudder  to  a  yawn  by  simply 
overdoing  it.  It  is  this  inability  to  know  where 
to  stop  which  in  like  fashion  has  brought  dis- 
credit on  his  pathos.  He  really  had  pathos; 
but  he  could  not  be  content  with  a  moderate 
dose  of  it,  and  must  needs  froth  and  whip  and 


Dickens.  131 

be-devil  it  till  it  becomes  half  insipid,  half  ful- 
some. Just  the  same,  again,  may  be  said  of  his 
mere  mannerisms  of  style  and  figure,  though  it 
is  fair  to  allow  that  in  his  very  last  years,  unless 
we  may  suspect  a  probable  relapse  in  "  Edwin 
Drood,"  he  made  a  rather  remarkable  recovery 
from  the  depths  to  which  he  had  fallen  in  "  Little 
Dorrit "  and  "  Hard  Times."  In  these  the  dam- 
nable iteration  about  Panks  the  "  tug,"  and  the 
figure  of  Louisa  as  Mrs.  Sparsit  sees  it  going 
down  the  descent,  and  other  similar  things,  are 
almost  enough  to  make  the  gorge  rise.  In  his 
political  and  social  satire,  in  his  amiable  optimist 
life-philosophy,  in  his  marvellous  egotism,  in  a 
dozen  other  characteristics  of  his,  this  same 
utter  absence  of  the  sense  of  limit  appears, 
and  is  the  secret  of  his  failures.  He  will  put 
on  the  stage  a  clumsy  lay  figure  like  Sir  John 
Chester  and  a  perfectly  human  being  like  Mrs. 
Varden  with  equal  composure,  and  with  an 
equally  undoubting  faith  that  both  are  quite 
as  they  should  be. 

There  are,  I  believe,  some  people  who  would 
extend  this  unreality  even  to  his  humorous  crea- 


132  Corrected  Impressions. 

tions.  I  cannot  do  this.  Of  course  in  his  later 
years  the  stream  naturally  ran  with  a  good 
deal  less  of  volume  and  with  somewhat  less 
sparkle  and  sprightliness  than  it  showed  at  first. 
But  I,  at  least,  can  discover  no  very  great  decline 
in  strict  quality  between  Mr.  Jingle  and  the 
dolls'  dressmaker's  papa,  between  Dick  Swivel- 
ler  and  Joe  Gargery.  There  may  be  something 
of  the  "  irreparable  outrage  of  years "  in  the 
later  figures,  but  they  are  of  one  kith  and  one 
kin  with  the  earlier.  No  doubt  such  things  as 
the  machinations  of  Mr.  Boffin,  and  the  exclama- 
tions he  utters  in  the  effort  to  carry  them  through, 
are  inexpressibly  tedious  and  dull.  But  then  it 
is  a  grave  error  to  class  these  with  the  efforts  of 
Dickens's  own  native  humour  at  all.  They  belong 
to  the  Banks  business  noticed  above,  —  to  the 
strange,  mechanical,  wooden-legged  method  of 
dot-and-go-one  progression  with  which  he  chose 
at  all  times  to  alternate  the  easy  flight  of  his  nat- 
ural wings.  They  belong  to  the  false  Dickens, 
the  black  horseman,  the  Mr.  Hyde  of  the  organ- 
ism, as  distinctly  as  do  the  Markses  and  the 
Ralph  Nicklebys,  the  washy  pathetics  and  the 


Dickens. 


"^33 


windy  politics,  the   leather-and-prunella   peers, 
and  the  good-young-person  heroines. 

It  is  quite  different  with  the  group,  or  rather 
army,  of  immortal  grotesques,  who,  with  the 
elder  Mr.  Weller  for  their  general,  and  his  son 
for  chief  of  the  staff,  have  now  travelled  the 
Journey  from  this  World  to  the  Next  for  a  good 
many  years,  and  are,  I  think,  tolerably  safe  of 
their  journey's  end.  Although,  or  because, 
extravagance  is  of  their  essence,  we  seldom  — 
I  hardly  ever  —  feel  them  to  be  extravagant. 
So  unerring  has  been  the  genius  of  their  author, 
so  perfectly  has  he  arranged  them  in  the  particu- 
lar key  to  which  they  belong,  that  the  jars  and 
false  notes  which  alone  could  throw  them  out 
never  occur.  It  is  true,  and  is  perhaps  a  ne- 
cessary complement  and  corollary  of  this  other 
truth,  that  they  are  never  completely  human. 
They  have  admirably  human  traits,  they  utter 
the  wisest  saws  and  the  most  modern  instances, 
the  touches  of  nature  which  their  author  gives 
them  and  which  they  exhibit  are  of  the  finest. 
Certainly  they  are  not  inhuman,  but  they  are,  I 
think,  decidedly  extra-human.     They  belong  to 


134  Corrected  Impressions. 

a  world  not  much,  but  definitely  and  unmistak- 
ably, different  from  the  actual.  It  has  been 
pointed  out  before  now  that  the  two  great  con- 
temporaries, Dickens  and  Balzac,  each  possessed 
this  singular  gift  as  it  may  be  called  from  one 
point  of  view,  this  singular  failing  as  it  may  be 
called  from  another.  They  both  draw  with 
unerring  faithfulness  characters  which  they  have 
themselves  invented]  they  fill  a  universe^ which 
they  have  themselves  created.  The  creation  of 
Dickens  is  indeed  somewhat  fantastic  and  shad- 
owy beside  that  of  Balzac,  a  magic  lantern  show- 
rather  than  a  human  comedy;  but,  on  the  other 
hand,  individual  figures  of  the  English  master's 
have  a  vividness  and  vigour  of  life  exceeding 
anything  in  the  French.  Yet  in  Dickens,  even 
more  than  in  Balzac,  we  feel  the  constant  pres- 
ence of  the  theatre, —  of  the  boards  and  the 
lamps, —  the  property  man  and  the  prompter. 
Take,  for  instance,  the  guests  of  the  immortal 
"  Swarry  "  in  "  Pickwick,"  one  of  the  greatest  and 
liveliest  things  that  Dickens  has  done.  They 
have  the  most  delightful  touches;  they  act  their 
parts  with  remarkable  verve :    and  yet  we   feel 


Dickens. 


^35 


that  they  are  not  real  footmen.     None  of  them 

—  nobody  at  all  like  them  —  ever  opened  a  door 
to  us  or  took  away  a  coat  from  us.  Whereas 
Thackeray  with  much  less  elaborate  effort  has 
created  more  than  one  of  their  brethren, —  J.  J.'s 
papa,  the  precious  footman  of  Sir  Francis  Clav- 
ering  who  objected  to  and  avoided  a  "  holterca- 
tion,"  and  others  —  whom  we  know  to  have  been 

—  to  be  —  alive.  They  are  hanging  on  behind 
carriages  at  actual  drawing-rooms,  and  carrying 
with  or  without  a  sense  of  offended  dignity 
actual  coals  to  real  fires.  Those  about  Mr. 
John  Smauker  never  did  anything  of  the  sort 
except  in  the  Theatre  Royal,  Kennaquhair. 

Yet  this,  as  it  seems  to  me,  has  a  certain 
advantage.  I  was  surprised  to  see  it  suggested 
the  other  day  that  "  Pickwick  "  is  losing  its  pro- 
priety of  atmosphere.  I  should  have  thought 
that,  except  to  the  very  oldest  men  now  living, 
it  had  long  lost  all  that  it  ever  had.  I  am  not 
young,  and,  as  I  have  said,  I  began  to  read 
"  Pickwick"  very  early.  But,  by  that  time,  the 
coaches  and  the  hackney  coaches,  the  domestic 
suppers  and  the  London  taverns  that  were  not 


ij6  Corrected  Impressions. 

mere  gin  palaces,  were  things  of  the  past.  Nor 
even  when  they  were  not  can  I  think  that  to 
close  observers  Dickens  can  ever  have  seemed 
a  realist.  He  was  too  glaringly  fantastic,  phan- 
tasmagoric, theatrical,  for  that.  Save  in  a  few 
externals  and  in  his  politics,  which,  thank 
Heaven,  hardly  appear  in  "  Pickwick  "  itself  at  all, 
he  is  of  no  particular  time,  though  his  knowledge 
of  part  of  human  nature  is  enough  to  make 
him  sufficiently  of  all.  His  peculiar  variety  of 
humour  has  often  been  described  as,  or  attrib- 
uted to,  animal  spirits.  This  does  not  seem  to 
me  fully  adequate,  for  there  is  something  much 
more  than  mere  animal  spirits  therein.  There  is 
a  quaint  and  fantastic  habit  of  brain,  an  immense 
observation  of  the  ways  of  men,  even  a  certain 
though  a  limited  sense  of  the  irony  of  life.  And 
the  zest  and  character  of  this  are  perhaps  height- 
ened by  the  exclusions  and  the  short-comings 
which  accompany  it.  There  is  no  sense  of 
poetry,  none  of  mystery,  hardly  any  of  religion, 
in  Dickens.  Passion  has  a  merely  rudimentary 
and  infantile  expression ;  art  and  literature  next 
to  none ;  philosophy  none  at  all ;  history,  sci- 


Dickens. 


137 


ence,    many   other  things,    hardly   any.      And 
perhaps  these  lacks,  these  absences,  helped  to 
concentrate  the  force  and  presence  of  what  is 
present,  so  as  to  intensify  its  marvellous  humour- 
istic  quality. 


XV. 

MATTHEW  ARNOLD. 

AMONG  the  subjects  of  these  papers  there 
is  hardly  one  in  regard  to  whom  I  can 
speak  in  the  tone  of  "  How  it  struck  a  con- 
temporary," to  the  same  extent  as  I  can  with 
regard  to  Mr.  Matthew  Arnold.  Not  of  course 
that  I  can  claim  to  have  been  a  contemporary 
of  Mr.  Arnold's  in  the  strict  sense ;  for  he  had 
taken  his  degree  before  I  was  born,  and  was 
an  author  before  I  was  able  to  spell.  But  I 
can  lay  claim  to  having  seen  the  birth  of  his 
popularity,  its  whole  career  till  his  death,  the 
stationary  state  which  preceded  and  succeeded 
that  death,  and  something  like  a  commencement 
of  the  usual  depreciation  and  spoliation  which 
so  surely  follows.  For  Mr.  Arnold's  reputation 
made  no  very  early  or  general  way  with  the 
public,  however  high  it  may  have  been  with  his 
private  friends,  and  with  a  small  circle  of  (chiefly 


Matthew  Arnold.  ijn 


University)  readers  of  poetry.  A  University 
Professorship  has  not  very  often  been  the  occa- 
sion of  attracting  public  attention  to  a  man  in 
England;  but  it  may  be  said  with  some  con- 
fidence that  the  remarkable  "  Lectures  on  Trans- 
lating Homer"  were  the  first  which  drew  to  Mr. 
Arnold  the  notice  of  the  world.  He  was  then 
nearly  forty,  and  he  was  several  years  over  that 
Age  of  Wisdom  when  the  "  French  Eton "  and 
still  more  the  "  Essays  in  Criticism  "  fascinated 
the  public  with  a  double  mannerism  of  speech 
and  thought  in  prose,  and  set  it  inquiring  about 
the  author's  verse. 

Most  young  men  of  twenty  who  had  any  taste 
for  English  letters  when  the  "  Essays  "  appeared 
fell  in  love  with  them,  I  believe,  at  once  and 
desperately,  with  the  more  or  less  natural  con- 
sequence of  getting  tired  of  them,  if  not  pos- 
itively disliking  them,  afterwards.  My  own 
admiration  for  them  was,  to  the  best  of  my 
remembrance,  a  good  deal  more  lukewarm  at 
first ;  and  though  it  has  never  got  any  colder 
since,  and  has,  I  think,  a  little  increased  in  tem- 
perature, it  never  has  been,  and  I  do  not  think 


140  Corrected  Impressions. 

it  ever  will  be,  at  boiling  point.  I  may  give 
some  reasons  for  this  later,  for  the  moment  let 
us  be  historical. 

It  was  undoubtedly  one  of  those  happy  coin- 
cidences which,  according  to  the  optimist,  hap- 
pen to  all  of  us  who  really  deserve  them,  that 
just  after  the  reading  public  had  awakened  to 
the  sense  that  there  was  a  very  piquant  and  re- 
markable writer  of  English  prose  wrapped  in 
the  coat  of  one  whom  it  had  hitherto  regarded, 
if  at  all,  as  a  composer  of  elegant,  but  rather 
academic  verse,  the  great  political  change  of 
1867  happened,  and  a  reign  of  sharp  social  and 
political  changes  began.  I  do  not  think  myself 
that  the  revolution  of  1 868-1 874  has  ever  been 
fully  estimated,  and  I  have  always  thought 
it  half  an  advantage  and  half  a  disadvantage 
that  I  was  myself  resident  out  of  London  during 
the  whole  of  that  time.  The  looker-on  sees  the 
drift  of  the  game  more  clearly,  but  he  appre- 
ciates the  motives  and  aims  of  those  who  take 
part  in  it  less  fully  than  the  players.  During 
these  years  Mr.  Arnold  seemed  to  have  a  great 
part  before   him.      Everything    (following    his 


Matthew  Arnold.  141 

father's  famous  definition  of  Liberalism)  "  was 
an  open  question,"  and  the  Apostle  of  Culture 
with  his  bland  conviction,  first,  that  most  things 
were  wrong  in  England,  and,  secondly,  that  he 
was  born  to  set  them  right,  and  with  a  singu- 
larly stimulating  and  piquant  style  to  help  him, 
had  an  unusually  clear  field. 

As  a  matter  of  fact,  Mr.  Arnold  did  help  to 
produce  a  considerable  effect  on  the  public. 
But  it  was  an  effect  chiefly  negative  as  far  as 
the  public  was  concerned,  and  it  cannot  be  said 
to  have  been  altogether  happy  as  regards  him- 
self. To  the  finest  flowers  of  his  production, 
such  as  the  delightful  whimsy  of  "  Friendship's 
God,"  little  attention  was  paid  :  the  good  pub- 
lic. Populace,  Philistines,  and  Barbarians  alike, 
could  not  make  out  what  the  devil  Mr.  Arnold 
was  driving  at.  His  formulas,  after  pleasing  for 
a  while,  were  seen  to  be  rather  empty  things ; 
his  actual  politics,  if  he  had  any,  (a  point  on 
which  I  have  always  entertained  doubts,)  ap- 
peared to  be  totally  unpractical ;  and  he  had  not 
the  chance  which  Mr.  Mill  and  Mr.  Morley  en- 
joyed or  suffered,  of  showing  whether  a  sojourn 


142  Corrected  Impressions. 

in  the  House  could  practicalise  them.  Un- 
luckily too  for  him,  he  allowed  his  energies  to 
drift  almost  wholly  into  the  strange  anti-theo- 
logical kind  of  theology  which  occupied  him  for 
nearly  ten  years,  which  at  first  brought  on  him 
much  odium  and  never  attained  for  him  much 
reputation,  which  appears  to  me,  I  confess,  to 
have  palpably  stiffened  and  dulled  his  once  mar- 
vellous lissomeness  and  brilliancy  of  thought, 
and  which  is  now  abandoned  to  cheap  beginners 
in  undogmatism  alike  by  the  orthodox  and  the 
unorthodox  of  some  mental  calibre. 

Then  for  another  ten  years  Mr.  Arnold  settled 
slowly  back  again,  under  the  disadvantages  just 
referred  to,  into  his  proper  line  of  poet,  literary 
and  miscellaneous  essayist,  and  mild  satirist  of 
society.  Once  in  verse,  in  the  exquisite  lines 
entitled  "Westminster  Abbey"  (I  would  they 
had  had  a  better  subject,  not  than  the  Abbey, 
but  than  Dean  Stanley),  once  or  twice  in  prose, 
as  in  the  famous  charge  on  the  Shelleyites  and 
other  things,  the  Apostle  of  Sweetness  and 
Light  appeared  at  his  very  best;  and  perhaps 
he  was  never,  except  in  the  wondrous  muddle- 


Matthew  Arnold.  143 


headedness  of  the  "  Irish  Essays,"  far  below  it. 
But  in  all  the  works  of  this  time,  though  the 
positive  dulness  of  the  phase  of  which  "  St. 
Paul  and  Protestantism"  is  perhaps  the  Nadir 
never  reappeared,  there  is,  to  me  at  least,  a  sense 
of  two  drawbacks.  There  is  a  failing  fineness  of 
power  in  a  man  whose  power  had  at  its  best 
been  nothing  if  not  fine,  a  growing  heaviness 
of  touch,  a  sleight  of  words  that  becomes  a 
trick,  a  damnable  iteration,  an  occasional  pas- 
sage from  agreeable  impertinence  to  something 
else  that  is  not  agreeable.  And  there  is,  on  the 
other  hand,  an  obvious  disgust  and  dissatisfac- 
tion at  the  very  results  which  he  had  hoped  and 
helped  to  attain.  It  was  impossible  that  Mr. 
Arnold  should  accept  democracy  with  anything 
but  the  wryest  of  faces ;  and  he  must  have  found 
the  new  Pharisees  of  undogmatism  whom  his 
religious  musings  had  brought  about  suggestive 
of  another  work  by  the  same  author  as  "  Reli- 
gious Musings,"  —  the  "  Ode  to  a  Young  Ass." 
The  Young  Ass  has  begun  to  kick  at  Mr. 
Arnold  now,  I  see,  as  the  fashion  of  him  passeth 
away. 


144  Corrected  Impressions. 

But  it  was  never  possible  for  any  competent 
person,  however  much  he  might  find  to  dislike 
in  this  fascinating  and  irritating  writer,  to  fail 
in  recognition  of  his  extraordinary  powers. 
One  might  wince  at  the  almost  unbelievable 
faults  of  taste  which  he,  arbiter  elegantiarmn 
as  he  was,  would  not  unfrequently  commit; 
frown  at  the  gaudy  tricks  of  a  mannerism  quite 
as  bad  as  those  which  he  was  never  weary  of 
denouncing ;  demur  to  his  misleading  and  snip- 
snap  phrases  about  "  criticism  of  life,"  "  lucid- 
ity," "  grand  style,"  and  what  not.  There  were 
a  great  many  things  that  he  did  not  know  or 
did  not  fancy;  and  like  most  of  us,  no  doubt, 
he  was  very  apt  to  think  that  what  he  did  not 
know  was  not  worth  the  knowing,  and  that 
only  very  poor  and  unhappy  creatures  could 
like  what  he  did  not  fancy. 

Now  all  these  things  are  specially  bad  prepa- 
rations for  the  task  of  the  critic ;  and  perhaps 
Mr.  Arnold's  critical  abilities,  if  not  overrated, 
were  wrongly  estimated.  It  was  difficult  to 
praise  too  highly  the  expression  of  his  criticism 
when   it  was  at   its   best;  but   it  was   easy  to 


Matthew  Arnold.  145 


set  the  substance  too  high.     Even  his  subtlety 
and  his  acuteness,   two  faculties  in   regard   to 
which  I  suppose  his  admirers   would  put  him 
highest,  were  rather  more  apparent  than  real, 
and  were  constantly  blunted  and  fettered  by  the 
extraordinary  narrowness  and  crotchettiness  of 
his    range    of    sympathies.      He    was    always 
stumbling  over  his  own  formulas;    and  he  not 
unfrequently  violated  his  own  canons.     At  least 
I  am  myself  quite  unable  to  reconcile  that  doc- 
trine of  confining  ourselves  to  "  the  best,"  which 
it  seems  rules  out  the   "  Chanson  de   Roland  " 
and  makes   Shelley  more  remarkable  as  a  let- 
ter-writer   than   as   a   poet,  with   the   attention 
paid  to  Senancour  and  the  Gu^rins. 

The  real  value  of  Mr.  Arnold  as  a  critic  — 
apart  from  his  indirect  merit  of  providing  much 
delightful  English  prose  shot  with  wit  and 
humour,  and  enclosing  endless  sweetmeats  if 
not  solids  of  sense  —  consisted  chiefly  in  the 
comparative  novelty  of  the  style  of  literary 
appreciation  which  he  adopted,  and  in  the  stimu- 
lus which  he  accordingly  gave  to  literary  study. 
Since  Hazlitt,  we  had  been  deficient  in  critics 


146  Corrected  Impressions. 

who  put  appreciation  before  codification;  and 
Hazlitt  himself  was  notoriously  untrustworthy 
through  caprice.  The  following  of  Sainte-Beuve 
saved  Mr.  Arnold  from  both  errors  to  some 
extent,  but  to  some  extent  only.  Though  well 
read,  he  was  not  extremely  learned ;  and  though 
acute,  he  was  the  very  reverse  of  judicial.  He 
had  fortunately  been  brought  up  on  classical 
literature,  to  which  he  pinned  his  faith ;  and  it 
is  impossible  that  any  one  with  this  advantage 
should  be  a  literary  heretic  of  the  worst  descrip- 
tion. But  he  constantly  committed  the  fault 
of  Shylock  in  regard  to  his  classics.  What  was 
not  in  the  classical  bond,  what  "  was  not  so 
expressed,"  could  not  be  good,  could  not  at 
least  be  of  the  best.  Now  I  will  yield  to  no 
man  in  my  respect  for  the  classics;  and  I  do 
not  think  that,  at  least  as  far  as  the  Greeks  are 
concerned,  any  one  will  ever  do  better  the 
things  that  they  did.  But  it  is  absurd  to  sup- 
pose or  maintain  that  the  canon  of  literary 
perfections  was  closed  when  the  Muses  left 
Philemon's  house. 

Mr.  Arnold,  then,  as  a  critic  seemed  to  me 


Matthew  Arnold.  147 


at  first,  and  has  ahvays  seemed  to  me,  flawed 
with  these  very  faults  of  freak  and  crotchet 
against  which  he  was  never  tired  of  protest- 
ing, and,  though  a  very  useful  alterative,  stim- 
ulant, and  check,  not  a  good  model,  and  a  sti.l 
worse  oracle.  I  should  say  of  him,  and  i 
think  I  have  always  recked  my  own  rede  from 
1865  to  the  present  day  in  this  respect,  "  Ad- 
mire, enjoy,  and  be  thankful  for  Mr.  Arnold  as 
a  critic;  but  be  careful  about  imitating  him, 
and  never  obey  him  without  examination." 
Of  Mr.  Arnold  as  a  poet  there  is  much  more 
to  be  said. 


XVI. 

MATTHEW  ARNOLD    {concluded). 

'  I  ^HE  book  in  which  I  first  made  acquaint- 
-■-  ance  with  any  considerable  quantity  of 
Mr.  Arnold's  poetry  was  the  so-called  second 
edition  of  the  "  Poems,"  containing  the  first 
issue  of  the  celebrated  Preface:  perhaps  the 
best  piece  of  criticism  (though  I  do  not  agree 
with  its  main  position)  that  the  author  ever  did. 
The  book  in  which  one  has  first  made  full  ac- 
quaintance with  a  poet  is  like  no  other  book ; 
it  has  the  charm  of  one  of  the  two  kisses 
celebrated  by  the  Spanish  folk-song.  Yet  I 
venture  to  think  —  divorcing  criticism  as  much 
as  possible  from  any  pathetic  or  egotistic  fal- 
lacy—  that  the  collection  was  and  is  an  ex- 
tremely favourable  one  for  the  purpose  of 
doing  full  but  friendly  justice  to  Mr.  Arnold's 
poetical  talent  For  it  was  the  selected  collec- 
tion of  a  good  deal  of  separately  written   and 


Matthew  Arnold.  149 

published  work,  made  by  a  man  who  was  in 
the  very  prime  of  his  intellectual  strength,  who 
was  "  commencing  critic"  after  a  youth  of 
poetry,  and  who  was  not  yet  tempted  by  any 
excessive  public  favour  to  spare  his  critical 
faculty  on  himself.  A  few  excellent  and  many 
interesting  things  were  written  afterwards,  and 
there  is  of  course  a  certain  historical  attrac- 
tion in  juvenilia^  such  as  the  full  form  of 
"  Empedocles,"  and  other  things  which  were 
only  restored  later.  But  the  best  things  of 
all  are  there,  —  the  best  sonnets,  "  Requiescat," 
"  The  Church  of  Brou,"  "  Tristram  and  Iseult," 
"  Sohrab  and  Rustum,"  "The  Forsaken  Mer- 
man," '•  The  Strayed  Reveller,"  and  "  Switzer- 
land," —  this  last  without  its  most  unfortunate 
coda,  "  The  Terrace  at  Berne,"  When  I  find 
myself  ranking  Mr.  Arnold  higher  as  a  poet 
than  some  do  whose  opinions  I  respect,  I  always 
endeavour  to  make  sure  that  the  cause  is  noth- 
ing illegitimate  connected  with  this  first  ac- 
quaintance. And  I  do  not  think  it  is.  For, 
though  he  himself  would  not  have  admitted 
it,  a  poet  is  to  be  judged  by  his  best  things, 


150  Corrected  Impressions. 

by  his  flashes,  by  his  highest  flights ;  and  there 
are  more  of  these  to  be  found  in  this  volume 
than  in  all  the  rest  of  Mr.  Arnold's  verse. 

It  is  on  the  whole,  however,  that  we  must 
correct  our  impressions  if  necessary,  and  a  very 
curious  and  interesting  study  "  the  whole "  is 
in  Mr.  Arnold's  case.  I  still  like  to  try  first 
to  raise  and  then  to  correct  the  impressions 
of  a  new-comer,  taking  the  standard  edition 
as  it  too  comes.  He  must,  I  should  think,  be 
staggered  and  disappointed  by  the  respecta- 
ble but  imitative  Wordsworthianism  of  the 
first  two  sonnets,  *'  Quiet  Work  "  and  "  To  a 
Friend."  But  the  Shakespeare  piece  is  truly 
magnificent,  and  as  Dryden's  famous  sentence 
has  said  the  best  and  most  final  thing  about 
Shakespeare  in  prose,  so  has  Mr.  Arnold  said 
the  best  and  most  final  thing  in  verse.  Then 
we  relapse  heavily,  to  be  uplifted  again  after 
pages  by  the  strains,  a  little  Wordsworthian 
still  but  freed  from  Wordsworthian  wooden- 
ness,  of  "  Mycerinus  "  with  its  splendid  close. 
But  the  problem  and  puzzle  —  a  problem  and 
a  puzzle  which  in  thirty  years  I  do  not  pretend 


Matthew  Arnold.  151 

to  have  solved  —  of  the  Arnoldian  inconsistency 
and  inequaUty  meet  us  full  in  "The  Church 
of  Brou."  Part  I.  is  prosaic  doggerel  which 
any  smart  boy  of  sixteen  could  have  written 
at  any  time  during  this  century.  Part  II.  is  a 
little  better.  And  then  Part  III.  is  poetry, — 
poetry  not  indeed  free  from  Wordsworthiau 
and  Miltonic  echoes,  but  poetry  indisputable, 
marmoreal,  written  for  all  time.  "  A  Modern 
Sappho  "  drops  to  Moore,  and  not  very  good 
Moore ;  and  then  with  "  Requiescat "  we  are 
in  upper  air  again.  It  is  not  faultless;  it  has 
lapses,  flatnesses,  cliches,  but  it  is  one  of  the 
great  lyrical  dirges  of  English. 

I  should  have  no  room  to  go  through  the  rest 
of  the  Poems,  especially  of  the  Early  Poems, 
with  this  minuteness.  It  must  suffice  to  say 
that  everywhere  we  find  these  strange  ups  and 
downs ;  —  now  rhymes  almost  descending  to 
the  cockney  level  of  Mrs.  Browning  at  her  unin- 
telligible worst,  now  curious  little  pedantries  of 
expression,  now  things  that  show  that  the  poet's 
craftsmanship  altogether  fails  him,  now  affecta- 
tions  and   imitations  of  every   sort   and  kind. 


152  Corrected  Impressions. 

And  hard  by  we  shall  find  nobilities  of  thought 
and  phrase  that  could  only  be  the  work  of  a 
poet,  and  almost  a  very  great  poet. 

In  considering  the  longer  narrative  poems  we 
must  remember  Mr.  Arnold's  pet  theory  that 
**  all  depends  on  the  subject,"  that  the  epic  and 
the  drama  stand  high  above  all  other  forms  of 
poetry,  and  so  forth.  I  own  that  they  do  not 
interest  me  greatly,  despite  the  magnificent  close 
of  "  Sohrab  and  Rustum,"  or  that  sudden  lyric 
burst  which  lightens  the  darkness  of  "  Tristram 
and  Iseult": 

"  IVhat  voices  are  these  on  the  clear  night  air  ? 
IVhat  lights  in  the  court  ?  what  steps  on  the  stair  ?  " 

The  truth  is  that  Mr.  Arnold  had  neither  the  nar- 
rative nor  (to  take  in  "  Merope  ")  the  dramatic 
gift.  For  to  possess  either  you  must  possess 
the  other  power  of  "keeping  your  own  head 
out  of  the  memorial,"  and  that  he  could  never 
do.  Nevertheless  it  is  something  wonderful  that 
he  should  be  as  bad  as  he  sometimes  is.  And 
the  inequality  is  the  same  in  his  ballads.  "  St. 
Brandan,"  with  a  magnificent  and  not  wholly 
unsuccessful  strain  in  it,  is  yet  not  quite  a  sue- 


Matthew  Arnold.  153 

cess.  "  The  Neckan  "  is  not  much  above  Mrs. 
Hemans.  But  "The  Forsaken  Merman"  is 
very  nearly  supreme.  He  is  not  popular  now, 
I  believe,  and  certainly  he  might  not  have  been 
written  if  there  had  been  no  Tennyson ;  but  he 
is  good,  —  good  all  through,  good  in  sentiment, 
good  in  music,  good  (which  is  the  rarest  thing 
in  poetry)  in  composition,  not  easily  surpassable 
in  finale.  The  man  who  wrote  "  The  Forsaken 
Merman  "  was  a  poet  sans  phrase. 

"Then,"  says  the  Advocatus  Diaboli,  "how 
did  he  come  to  write  some  other  things,  or  at 
least  to  print  and  publish  them?"  And  to  this 
question  I  can  give  no  answer.  "  Switzerland  " 
is  to  me  the  same  insoluble  puzzle  that  it  was  a 
quarter  of  a  century  ago,  and  more,  because  of 
the  coda  above  referred  to.  It  contains  one 
unsurpassed  and  not  often  matched  piece  of 
poetry,  the  famous  "  Isolation,"  or  "  To  Mar- 
guerite continued,"  which  begins: 

"Yes;  in  the  sea  of  life  enisled.'" 

It  contains  flashes  and  scraps  elsewhere  not 
far  below  this.     And  it  also  contains  common- 


154  Corrected  Impressions. 

place  coxcombry,  second  and  tenth  hand  rhet- 
oric, cheap  philosophising,  indistinct  description, 
enough  to  damn  half  a  dozen  minor  poets. 

Once  more  the  filling  of  the  sheets  warns  me 
that  I  must  not  proceed  in  this  analysis.  "  The 
Scholar  Gipsy  "  I  would  fain  think  nearly  fault- 
less, and  fain  hope  that  it  is  not  old  Oxford 
prejudice  that  makes  me  think  it  so.  "Faded 
Leaves,"  **  Growing  Old,"  and  a  dozen  other  sad 
descants  of  the  later  time,  have  a  real  and  not 
only  an  affected  strain  of  the  true,  the  great 
Melancholia.  "  Dover  Beach,"  though  I  do  not 
in  the  least  agree  with  it,  and  though  the  met- 
aphor of  the  retreating  tide  is  a  singularly 
damaging  one  for  the  poet's  meaning  (for  qui 
dit  ebb  dit  flood),  has  a  majestic  music.  And 
there  are  many  others  I  could  mention.  But  of 
mentioning  there  must  be  an  end,  that  we  may 
conclude  somewhat  more  generally. 

What  then  were  the  causes  which  made  the 
work  of  a  man  of,  as  it  seems  to  me,  undoubted 
and  real  original  poetic  faculty,  of  great  scholar- 
ship and  apparently  severe  taste,  a  professed 
critic  and  undoubtedly  a  lover  of  much  that  is 


Matthew  Arnold. 


155 


best  in  poetry,  so  unreal,  so  trivial  often,  so 
rarely  spontaneous  and  inevitable?  I  have 
already  said  that  in  repeated  readings  I  have 
never  been  able  quite  to  satisfy  myself  about 
these  causes.  I  cannot  quite  make  out  why  the 
critic  did  not  say  to  the  poet,  "  It  will  never  do 
to  publish  verse  like  this  and  this  and  this  and 
this,"  or  why  the  poet  did  not  say  to  the  critic, 
"  Then  we  will  make  it  worth  publishing,"  and 
proceed  to  do  so.  I  cannot  (for  the  other  re- 
corded instances,  the  chief  of  which  is  Gray,  are 
not  quite  to  the  point)  understand  how  a  poetic 
faculty  which  could  yield  "  The  Forsaken  Mer- 
man," the  best  things  of  the  "  Switzerland,"  the 
Shakespeare  sonnet,  the  finales  of  "  Mycerinus  " 
and  "  Sohrab  and  Rustum,"  with  not  a  little  else, 
should  have  been  such  a  barren  and  intermittent 
spring.  The  only  possible  explanation  —  which 
is  rather  a  statement  of  the  facts  than  an  inter- 
pretation of  them  — •  is  that  Mr.  Arnold's  spring 
of  poetry  though  fine  was  actually  faint,  that  he 
was  from  the  very  outset  a  thoroughly  literary 
writer,  more  sensitive  to  influences  than  fertile 
in  original  impulse,  and  that  the  considerable 


156  Corrected  Impressions. 

though  somewhat  late  access  of  popularity  after 
he  had  come  to  forty  years  turned  his  head  a 
little,  and  induced  him  to  disinter  and  refather 
things  which,  after  the  wise  example  of  Lord 
Tennyson  and  the  threat  of  Sir  Anthony  Abso- 
lute, he  would  have  done  well  to  unbeget,  utterly 
refusing  to  rebeget  them. 

Be  this  as  it  may,  Mr.  Arnold's  poetical  po- 
sition is  remarkable  in  our  literature,  and  not 
wholly  benign  in  its  influence.  He  provides 
for  those  who  know  and  love  letters  an  interest- 
ing and  admirable  example  of  a  literary  poet. 
He  provides  for  those  who  can  apppreciate 
poetry  some  exquisite  notes  nowhere  else  heard, 
and  not  to  be  resigned  even  if  the  penalty  for 
hearing  them  were  twenty  times  as  great.  But 
he  provides  also  a  most  dangerous  model.  For 
he  may  seem  to  suggest,  and  has,  I  think,  already 
\  suggested  to  some,  that  the  acquisition  by  dint 
"  of  labour  of  a  certain  "  marmoresque  "  dignity  of 
thought  and  phrase  will  atone  for  the  absence 
of  that  genius  which  cometh  not  with  labour, 
neither  goeth  with  the  lack  of  it 


XVII. 

THREE   MID-CENTURY  NOVELISTS. 

CHARLOTTE  BRONTE.  —  GEORGE  ELIOT.  — 
ANTHONY  TROLLOPE. 

nr^HERE  are,  I  suppose,  no  Victorian  novel- 
-*-  ists,  putting  very  recent  names  with  whom 
I  do  not  here  meddle  out  of  the  question,  who 
have  approached  the  popularity  of  Dickens  and 
Thackeray  more  nearly  than  Charlotte  Bronte, 
George  Eliot,  and  Anthony  Trollope.  They  are 
at  the  present  moment  in  three  different  stages 
of  the  experience  which  popular  novelists  go 
through  when  they  die,  and  it  may  be  a  little 
interesting  to  examine  their  case  from  the  point 
of  view  of  the  present  papers. 

The  author  of  "  Jane  Eyre "  has  had  one 
indisputable  reward  for  the  shortness  of  her 
brilliant  career.  She  has  become  a  classic ;  she 
has  been  recently  reprinted  as  such  with  authors 
the  youngest  of  whom  was  her  senior  by  nearly 


158  Corrected  Impressions. 

half  a  century;  and  though  it  cannot  be  said 
that  she  had  ever  quite  fallen  out  of  even  popu- 
lar knowledge,  any  one  with  a  tolerably  sharp 
eye  for  criticism  must  have  perceived  that  not 
a  few  readers  come  to  her,  as  they  come  to  a 
classic,  with  a  more  or  less  respectful  igno- 
rance. She  was  protected  from  that  most  un- 
gracious stage  of  depreciation  which  attacks 
many  of  her  kind  immediately  after,  if  not  even 
before,  their  death,  first  by  the  earliness  of  that 
event  in  her  case,  and  secondly  by  the  fact  that 
it  happened  at  a  peculiar  period.  In  1855  the 
English  world  had  not  yet  become  literary; 
and  though  I  do  not  know  that  the  quality  of 
the  best  literary  criticism  was  much  better  or 
much  worse  than  it  is  now,  the  volume  of  it  was 
infinitely  smaller.  There  were  far  fewer  news- 
papers; and  the  young  person  who,  on  the 
strength  of  a  modern  education,  a  comfortable 
confidence  in  his  own  judgment,  and  a  hand-book 
or  two  of  authorities  quotable  and  pillageable, 
commences  critic,  existed  in  smaller  numbers, 
and  had  very  much  fewer  openings.  Moreover, 
Currer  Bell  had  held  one  of  those  literary  posi- 


Three  Mid-Century  Novelists.     159 

tions  which  expose  the  holder  to  more  hardships 
at  first  than  afterwards.  She  belonged  to  no 
school;  she  was  not  involved  in  any  literary- 
parties  ;  she  rose  with  few  rivals,  and  she  died 
before  she  had  time  to  create  any.  So  that, 
though  she  had  great  difficulties  in  making  her 
way,  and  was  subjected  to  some  unfair  and 
ungenerous  comments  at  first,  when  she  had 
begun  to  make  that  way  she  had  little  direct 
detraction  to  fear. 

I  do  not  think  that  she  was  exactly  what  can 
be  called  a  great  genius,  or  that  she  would  ever 
have  given  us  anything  much  better  than  she 
did  give ;  and  I  do  not  think  that  with  critical 
reading  "  Jane  Eyre  "  improves,  or  even  holds 
its  ground  very  well.  It  has  strength,  or  at 
any  rate  force;  it  has  sufficient  originality  of 
manner ;  it  has  some  direct  observation  of  life 
within  the  due  limits  of  art ;  and  it  has  the  pi- 
quancy of  an  unfashionable  unconventionality 
at  a  very  conventional  time.  These  are  good 
things,  but  they  are  not  necessarily  great ;  and  it 
is  to  me  a  very  suspicious  point  that  quite  the  best 
parts  of  Charlotte  Bronte's  work  are  admittedly 


i6o  Corrected  Impressions. 

something  like  transcripts  of  her  personal  ex- 
perience. It  is  very  good  to  be  able  to  record 
personal  experience  in  this  pointed  and  vivid 
way;  and  perhaps  few  great  creators,  if  any, 
have  been  independent  of  personal  experience. 
But  they  have  for  the  most  part  transcribed  it 
very  far  ofif ;  and  they  have  intermixed  the  tran- 
scription with  a  far  larger  amount  of  direct  ob- 
servation of  others,  and  of  direct  imagination  or 
creation.  Those  who  have  not  done  so  fall  into 
the  second  or  lower  place,  and  do  not  often  rise 
out  of  it.  This  is  an  experience  for  confirma- 
tion of  which  I  can,  I  think,  confidently  appeal 
to  all  competent  reviewers  and  most  competent 
editors.  A  book  appears,  or  an  article  is  sent 
in,  wherein  this  or  that  incident,  mood,  charac- 
ter, what  not,  is  treated  with  distinct  vigour  and 
freshness.  The  reviewer  praises,  and  looks  with 
languid  interest  tempered  by  sad  experience  for 
the  second  book ;  the  editor  accepts,  and  looks 
with  eagerness  tempered  by  experience  still 
more  fatal  for  the  second  article.  Both  come, 
and  lo  !  there  is  either  a  distinct  falling  off  from, 
or  a  total  absence  of,  the  first  fine  rapture.     I 


Three  Mid-Century  Novelists.     16 1 

think  Charlotte  Bronte  is  the  capital  example 
of  this  familiar  fact,  in  a  person  who  has  actually- 
attained  to  literature. 

Not  that  she  never  did  anything  good  after 
"  Jane  Eyre."  I  think  better  than  most  people 
seem  to  have  done  of  "  Shirley,"  somewhat  less 
well  perhaps  of  "  Villette  "  and  "  The  Professor," 
But  in  all,  from  "  Jane  Eyre  "  itself  downward, 
there  is  that  rather  fatal  note  of  the  presence 
and  apparent  necessity  of  the  personal  experi- 
ence. It  is  portrait  painting  or  genre,  not  crea- 
tive art  of  the  unmistakable  kind,  and  in  the  one 
case  where  there  seems  to  be  a  certain  projec- 
tion of  the  ideal,  the  egregious  Mr.  Rochester, 
even  contemporary  opinion  —  thankful  as  it  was 
for  a  variation  of  type  from  the  usual  hero  with 
the  chiselled  nose,  the  impeccable,  or,  if  pecca- 
ble, amiable  character,  and  the  general  nullity 
—  recognised  at  once  that  the  ideal  was  rather 
a  poor  one.  It  was  as  much  of  a  schoolgirl's  or 
a  governess's  hero  as  any  one  of  Scott's  or 
Byron's.  It  is  quite  true  that  Rochester  is  not 
merely  ugly  and  rude,  but  his  ugliness  and  his 

rudeness  are  so  much  of  him!      And  though 
II 


1 62  Corrected  Impressions. 

Jane  herself  is  much  more  than  an  underbred 
little  hussy,  I  fear  there  is  underbreeding  and 
hussyness  in  her,  where  she  is  not  a  mere  photo- 
graph. I  used  to  think,  years  ago,  that  the  finest 
touch  in  all  Miss  Bronte's  work  is  where  the 
boy  in  "  Shirley "  makes  up  his  mind  to  ask 
Caroline  for  a  kiss  as  the  price  of  his  services, 
and  does  not.  I  am  not  much  otherwise  minded 
now. 


Twenty  years  ago  it  required,  if  not  a  genuine 
strength  of  mind,  at  any  rate  a  certain  amount 
of  "cussedness,"  not  to  be  a  George-Eliotite. 
All,  or  almost  all,  persons  who  had  "got  cul- 
ture "  admired  George  Eliot,  and  not  to  do  so 
was  to  be  at  best  a  Kenite  among  the  chosen 
people,  at  worst  an  outcast,  a  son  of  Edom  and 
Moab  and  Philistia.  Two  very  different  cur- 
rents met  and  mingled  among  the  worshippers 
who  flocked  in  the  flesh  to  St.  John's  Wood,  or 
read  the  books  in  ecstasy  elsewhere.  There 
was  the  rising  tide  of  the  aesthetic,  revering  the 
creator  of  Tito.  There  was  the  agnostic  herd, 
faithful   to   the  translator   of  Strauss   and   the 


Three  Mid-Century  Novelists.     163 


irregular  partner  of  Mr.  G.  H.  Lewes.  I  have 
always  found  myself  most  unfortunately  indis- 
posed to  follow  any  fashion,  and  I  never  re- 
member having  read  a  single  book  of  George 
Eliot's  with  genuine  and  whole-hearted  admira- 
tion. Yet  an  experience  which  I  once  went 
through  enables  me,  I  think,  to  speak  about 
her  at  least  without  ignorance.  When  "  Daniel 
Deronda"  appeared,  my  friend,  the  late  Dr. 
Appleton,  asked  me  to  review  it  for  the  Acad- 
etny.  My  hands  were  the  reverse  of  full  at 
the  time,  and  as  there  were  some  books  of  the 
author's  which  I  had  not  read,  and  others  which 
I  had  not  read  for  some  time,  I  thought  it  might 
be  worth  while  to  get  an  entire  set  and  read  it 
through  in  chronological  order,  and  so  "  get  the 
atmosphere  "  before  attacking  that  Ebrew  Jew. 
I  have  spent  many  days  with  less  pleasure  and 
less  profit  than  those  which  I  spent  on  this  task. 
And  when  I  had  finished  it,  I  came  to  an  opinion 
which  I  have  since  seen  little  reason  to  change. 
Something  of  what  has  been  already  said 
about  Charlotte  Bronte  will  apply  also  to  this 
very  different  contemporary  and  craftsfellow  of 


164  Corrected   Impressions. 


hers.  Neither  of  them  seems  to  have  had  in 
any  great  degree  the  male  faculties  of  creation 
and  judgment.  Both,  and  Miss  Evans  especially, 
had  in  no  ordinary  degree  the  female  faculty  of 
receiving,  assimilating,  and  reproducing.  Dur- 
ing a  long  and  studious  youth  she  received  and 
assimilated  impressions  of  persons,  of  scenes,  of 
books.  At  a  rather  belated  crisis  of  feeling  she 
experienced  what  I  suppose  must  be  called 
Love,  and  at  the  same  time  was  exposed  to  a 
fresh  current  of  thought,  such  as  it  was.  She 
travelled  and  enriched  her  store ;  she  frequented 
persons  of  distinction  and  was  influenced  by 
them.  And  then  it  came  out  in  novels,  at  first 
pretty  simple,  and  really  powerful;  then  less 
simple,  but  ingeniously  reproductive  of  certain 
phases  of  thought  and  sentiment  which  were 
current ;  last  of  all  reflective  of  hardly  anything 
(save  in  scattered  and  separate  scenes  where  she 
always  excelled)  except  strange  crotchets  of 
will-worship,  which  she  had  taken  up  to  replace 
the  faith  that  she  had  cast  out,  but  that  was 
evidently  more  or  less  necessary  to  her. 
She   beg:an  with   those  "  Scenes  of  Clerical 


Three  Mid-Century  Novelists.     165 

Life,"  which  some  very  fervent  worshippers  of 
hers,  I  believe,  put  at  the  head  of  all  her  work 
in  merit  as  in  time,  but  which  I  should  rank 
decidedly  below  the  best  parts  of  "  Adam  Bede  " 
and  the  wonderful  opening  of  "  Silas  Marner." 
Then  came  the  great  triumph,  "Adam  Bede," 
itself.  Of  course  it  is  extremely  clever ;  but  no 
one  who  calls  himself  a  critic  can  afford  to  for- 
get the  circumstances  in  which  it  appeared. 
Dickens's  best  work  was  done,  and  his  man- 
nerism was  already  disgusting  some  readers. 
Thackeray,  though  at  his  very  best,  had  not 
reached  full  popularity,  and  was  entirely  differ- 
ent in  style  and  subject  Charlotte  Bronte  was 
dead  or  dying,  —  I  forget  which ;  there  was 
nobody  else  who  could  even  pretend  to  the  first 
class.     How  could  "Adam  Bede"  fail? 

"The  Mill  on  the  Floss"  was  not  likely,  the 
circumstances  being  still  the  same,  to  diminish 
the  author's  vogue,  and  I  suppose  it  is  her  best 
book,  though  it  may  not  contain  her  best  scenes. 
The  objection  which  is  often  made  and  still 
oftener  felt  to  the  repulsiveness  of  Maggie's  wor- 
ship of  a  counter-jumping  cad  like  Stephen,  is 


1 66  Corrected  Impressions. 


somewhat  uncritical.  I  suspect  that  most  women 
resent  it,  because  they  feel  the  imputation  to 
be  true :  and  most  men  out  of  a  not  wholly  dis- 
similar feeling  which  acts  a  Httle  differently. 
"  Silas  Marner  "  again  has  qualities  of  greatness, 
though  the  narrative  and  characters  are  slight 
for  a  book.  But  between  these  earlier  novels 
and  the  later  batch  a  great  gulf  is  fixed.  Hardly 
after  "Silas"  do  we  find  anything,  except  in 
patches  and  episodes,  that  is  really  "  genial "  in 
George  Eliot's  work.  "  Felix  Holt "  and  "  Mid- 
dlemarch  "  are  elaborate  studies  of  what  seemed 
to  the  author  to  be  modern  characters  and  soci- 
ety,—  studies  of  immense  effort  and  erudition 
not  unenlightened  by  humour,  but  on  the  whole 
dead.  "  Romola  "  is  an  attempt  —  still  more 
Herculean,  and  still  more  against  the  grain  —  to 
resuscitate  the  past.  As  for  "  Daniel  Deronda," 
it  is  a  kind  of  nightmare,  —  a  parochial  and  gro- 
tesque idea  having  thoroughly  mastered  the 
writer  and  only  allowed  her  now  and  then  to  get 
free  in  the  character  of  Grandcourt  and  (less 
often)  in  that  of  Gwendolen.  I  think  "Theo- 
phrastus  Such  "  has  met  with  rather  undeserved 


Three  Mid-Century  Novelists.     167 

contempt,  due  to  the  fact  that  "  Deronda "  had 
already  begun  to  sap  the  foundations  of  its  au- 
thor's popularity.  The  poems  are  laboured  and 
thoroughly  unpoetical  expositions  of  crotchet  , 
and  theory.  The  essays  are  neither  better  nor 
worse  than  a  vast  number  of  essays  by  quite 
second-rate  authors. 

I  must  collect,  in  the  old  sense,  the  results  of 
this  in  another  paper,  which  will  also  give  me 
room  to  speak  of  Mr.  Trollope. 


XVIII. 

THREE    MID-CENTURY    NOVELISTS 
{concluded). 

•'  I  ^HE  brief  sketch  of  the  history  of  George 
-■-  Eliot's  work  from  the  outside  which  was 
given  at  the  end  of  the  last  paper  might  almost 
carry  with  it,  to  a  wary  and  experienced  mind, 
a  forecast  of  the  progress  of  George  Eliot's 
reputation.  But  there  was  another  influence 
of  the  first  importance  which  has  not  yet  been 
noticed,  I  never  knew  anything  personally  of 
Mr.  G.  H.  Lewes.  But  he  was  certainly  a  very 
clever  man :  and  as  a  literary  trainer,  with  a  view 
to  the  present  success  of  the  still  more  clever 
companion  whom  accident  threw  in  his  way,  he 
was  really  consummate.  I  think  George  Eliot 
might  possibly  have  occupied  a  higher  place  in 
literary  history  if  she  had  never  met  him  at  all ; 
but  it  is  rather  more  probable  that  she  might 
have  occupied  none  whatever.     As  it  was,  he 


Three  Mid-Century  Novelists.      169 

managed  to  put  her  literary  faculties  in  a  kind 
of  forcing-house.  The  anonymity  which  was 
maintained  over  the  "  Scenes  of  Clerical  Life  " 
and  "Adam  Bede,"  may  have  been  at  first  unin- 
tentional, but  its  efifect  both  on  the  public  and 
the  producer  was  no  doubt  stimulating  in  the 
highest  degree.  When  it  had  been  dropped, 
Mr.  Lewes  fell  at  once  with  extraordinary  tact 
into  the  way  of  life  which  best  suited  the  forte 
and  the  foible  of  Miss  Evans.  He  gave  her 
assiduous  personal  attention  and  a  sort  of  sham 
position  as  the  head  of  a  family.  He  did  not 
overwork  her,  and  he  administered  plenty  of  the 
foreign  travel  and  home  atmosphere  of  literary 
society  which  she  liked.  He  fended  off  all  but 
favourable  reviews,  and  while  dexterously  sur- 
rounding her  with  a  court  of  faithful  devotees 
protected  her  from  any  rough  contact  with  the 
give-and-take  of  the  world.  All  these  things 
worked  together  with  her  own  unquestioned 
endowments,  not  merely  to  bring  her  money 
and  fame,  but  actually  to  stimulate  her  pro- 
ductive faculties  to  the  highest  possible  point 
in  a  certain  way. 


lyo  Corrected  Impressions. 

In  a  certain  other  way  the  result  was  disas- 
trous. She  never  lived  in  the  open.  Her  first 
intellectual  expansion  had  taken  place  in  a  nar- 
row clique  of  Unitarian  Nonconformity ;  and  she 
had  but  exchanged  it  for  one  little  wider,  of 
agnostic  and  anti-theological  journalism.  Her 
last  twenty  or  five  and  twenty  years  were  spent 
in  a  close  conservatory,  receiving  adulation  from 
others,  and  brooding  over  her  own  negative 
creed.  The  nearest  analogue  that  I  can  think 
of  to  her  among  the  greater  names  of  fiction  is 
Richardson,  to  whose  work  hers  has  indeed  a 
striking  resemblance  in  more  ways  than  one. 
But  even  Richardson  lived  in  a  healthier  time 
and  was  exposed  to  healthier  influences.  No- 
body "  rattled  her  shutters,"  to  take  Thack- 
eray's excellent  metaphor,  as  Fielding  rattled 
Richardson's.  She  had  no  experience  of  active 
business,  such  as  the  printer  had,  with  ruthless 
customers,  prosaic  workmen,  and  the  like,  to  give 
her  a  taste  of  the  actual  world.  And  so  there 
was,  even  from  the  first,  a  taint  of  the  morbid 
and  the  unnatural  upon  her.  The  flowers  forced 
from  her  in  this  non-natural  atmosphere  and  by 


Three  Mid-Century   Novelists.     171 

this  non-natural  treatment  had,  as  is  customary 
in  such  cases,  no  small  Mat  and  attraction  at 
first,  but  their  colour  and  their  form  grew  less 
and  less  lifelike  as  time  went  on,  and  their ' 
inherent  weakness  caused  them  to  fade  sooner 
and  sooner.  That  this  would  have  been  the 
case  anyhow  I  do  not  doubt,  but  the  Nemesis 
of  the  liaison  with  Lewes  exhibited  itself  in  an 
even  more  unmistakable  fashion  than  this.  The 
scientific  phraseology  to  which  he  himself  was 
more  or  less  sincerely  devoted  invaded  his  com- 
panion's writing  with  a  positive  contagion,  and 
what  many  independent  critics  had  been  saying 
for  years  became  the  public  voice  on  the  appear- 
ance of  "  Daniel  Deronda."  Coterie  admiration 
lasted  a  little  longer;  and  that  popular  reflex 
which  a  well-engineered  fame  always  brings 
with  it,  a  little  longer  still.  And  then  it  all 
broke  down,  and  for  some  years  past  George 
Eliot,  though  she  may  still  be  read,  has  more 
or  less  passed  out  of  contemporary  critical  ap- 
preciation. There  are,  of  course,  a  few  obsti- 
nate and  "  know-nothing  "  worshippers ;  perhaps 
there  are  some  who  kept  their  heads  even  in  the 


172  Corrected   Impressions. 

heyday,  and  who  can  now  say  sunt  lachrymm 
rerum,  as  they  contemplate  a  fame  once  so 
great,  in  part  so  solidly  founded,  and  yet  now 
to  a  greater  extent  than  strict  justice  can  ap- 
prove almost  utterly  vanished  away. 


The  vicissitudes  of  Mr.  Anthony  Trollope's 
reputation  are  less  striking  and  perhaps  less  in- 
structive than  those  of  George  Eliot's,  for  there 
can  be  very  little  doubt  that  Miss  Evans  had 
genius,  and  I  never  met  more  than  one  compe- 
tent critic  (a  personal  friend,  by  the  way,  of  the 
author  of  "The  Warden")  who  thought  that 
Mr.  Trollope  had.  But  he  had  immense  fertility, 
and  if  not  immense,  very  great  talent ;  and  his 
career  is  in  consequence  something  of  a  warning. 
Unless  I  mistake  very  greatly,  no  novelist  towards 
.the  end  of  the  sixties  was  in  greater  demand  at 
the  circulating  libraries,  and  by  the  editors  and 
publishers  of  magazines  which  published  serial 
novels,  than  Mr.  Trollope ;  and  certainly  no  one 
ever  set  himself  to  satisfy  that  demand  with 
greater  energy  or  in  a  more  business-like  spirit. 


Three  Mid-Century  Novelists.      173 

He  probably  did  himself  no  good  with  the  pub- 
lic or  the  critics  by  the  quaint  frankness  of  his 
avowals  in  his  Autobiography  as  to  the  strictly 
professional  fashion  —  so  many  hours  per  day, 
and  so  many  words  per  hour  —  in  which  he  did 
his  "  chores."  And  certainly  there  was  a  time 
when  the  public  altogether  failed  to  respond  to 
his  endeavours  to  please  them.  His  last  half- 
dozen,  if  not  his  last  dozen  novels,  were  I  believe 
indifferent  pecuniary  successes ;  and  I  remember 
very  well  the  difficulties  under  which  I  found 
myself  when  I  had  to  criticise  more  than  one  of 
them.  For  it  is,  I  think,  a  law  of  the  Medes 
and  Persians,  "Never  speak  evil  of  man  or 
woman  who  has  given  you  pleasure,"  and  I 
admit  that  in  the  days  of  the  "  Chronicles  of 
Barset,"  Mr.  Trollope  gave  me  a  very  great  deal 
of  pleasure.  But  it  is  also  a  law  of  honest  criti- 
cism never  to  say  what  you  do  not  think,  though 
it  is  by  no  means  necessary  to  say  all  that  you 
do  think,  and  it  was  not  easy  to  reconcile  these 
two  laws  in  the  late  seventies  and  early  eighties 
with  regard  to  Mr.  Anthony  Trollope. 

He  seems  indeed  to  me  to  be  the  most  remark- 


174  Corrected  Impressions. 


able  example  we  have  yet  seen  of  a  kind  of  writer 
who  I  suppose  is  destined  to  multiply  as  long  as 
the  fancy  for  novel-reading  lasts.  Only  a  few 
months  ago  it  fell  to  my  lot  to  read  through  the 
work  of  a  famous  amuseur  of  this  kind  in  the  gen- 
eration before  Mr,  Trollope's,  a  man  as  famous 
as  himself  in  his  own  day,  and  of  gifts  certainly 
more  varied  and  perhaps  not  less  considerable. 
And  the  resemblance  between  Theodore  Hook 
and  Anthony  Trollope  struck  me,  I  own,  forcibly 
and  rather  terribly.  Hook  is  of  course  at  a 
much  greater  disadvantage  with  a  reader  of  the 
present  day  —  at  least  with  a  reader  of  my  stand- 
ing—  than  is  Trollope.  Much  of  him  is  pos- 
itively obsolete,  while  in  Trollope's  case  the 
mere  outward  framework,  the  ways  and  language 
of  society,  the  institutions,  customs,  and  atmos- 
phere of  daily  life,  have  not  had  time  to  alter 
very  strikingly,  if  at  all.  Trollope  too,  did  not 
attempt  the  purely  comic  vein,  as  did  Hook; 
and  the  purely  comic  vein,  unless  it  be  absolutely 
transcendent,  and  of  the  first  class,  is  that  which 
dries  soonest. 

But  still  they  are  of  the  same  general  kind, 


Three  Mid-Century  Novelists.      175 

and  their  motto,  the  motto  of  their  kind,  is  Mene^ 
Tekel.  I  do  not  even  think  that  any  one  is  ever 
again  Ukely  to  attain  even  so  high  a  rank  in  it  as 
Mr.  Trollope's.  Most  have  got  the  seed,  and  the 
flower  has  become  common  accordingly.  I  do 
not  know  that  I  myself  ever  took  Mr.  Trollope 
for  one  of  the  immortals ;  but  really  between 
i860  and  1870  it  might  have  been  excusable 
so  to  take  him.  In  "Barchester  Towers,"  es- 
pecially, there  are  characters  and  scenes  which 
go  uncommonly  near  the  characters  and  scenes 
that  do  not  die.  Years  later  the  figure  of  Mr. 
Crawley  and  the  scene  of  the  final  vanquishing 
of  Mrs.  Proudie  simulate,  if  they  do  not  possess, 
immortal  quality.  And  in  the  enormous  range 
of  the  other  books  earlier  and  later  it  would  not 
be  difficult  to  single  out  a  number — a  very 
considerable  number  —  of  passages  not  greatly 
inferior  to  these.  From  almost  the  beginning 
until  quite  the  end,  Mr.  Trollope  —  whether  by 
diligent  contemplation  of  models,  by  dexterous 
study  from  the  life,  or  by  the  mere  persistent 
craftsman's  practice  which  turns  out  pots  till  it 
turns  them  out  flawlessly  —  showed  the  faculty 


176  Corrected   Impressions. 

of  constructing  a  thoroughly  readable  story. 
You  might  not  be  extraordinarily  enamoured 
of  it;  you  might  not  care  to  read  it  again;  you 
could  certainly  feel  no  enthusiastic  reverence 
for  or  gratitude  to  its  author.  But  it  was  emi- 
nently satisfactory ;  it  was  exactly  what  it  held 
itself  out  to  be;  it  was  just  what  men  and 
women  had  sent  to  Mudie's  to  get.  Perhaps 
there  is  never  likely  to  be  very  much,  and  still 
less  likely  to  be  too  much,  of  such  work  about 
the  world. 

And  yet  even  such  work  is  doomed  to  pass, 
—  with  everything  that  is  of  the  day  and  the 
craftsman,  not  of  eternity  and  art.  It  was 
not  because  Mr.  Trollope  had,  as  I  believe  he 
had  in  private  life,  a  good  deal  of  the  genial 
Philistine  about  him,  that  his  work  lacks  the 
certain  vital  signs.  We  have  record  of  too 
many  artists,  up  to  the  very  greatest,  who  took 
no  romantic  or  sacerdotal  view  of  their  art,  and 
who  met  the  demand  of  the  moment  as  regu- 
larly and  peaceably  as  might  be.  You  will  no 
more  avoid  failure  by  systematic  unbusiness- 
likeness,  than  you  will  secure  success  by  strict 


Three  Mid-Century  Novelists.     177 

attention  to  business.  The  fault  of  the  Trol- 
lopian  novel  is  in  the  quality  of  the  Trollopian 
art.  It  is  shrewd,  competent,  not  insufficiently 
supported  by  observation,  not  deficient  in  more 
than  respectable  expressive  power,  careful,  in- 
dustrious, active  enough.  But  it  never  has  the 
last  exalting  touch  of  genius,  it  is  every-day, 
commonplace,  and  even  not  infrequently  vulgar. 
These  are  the  three  things  that  great  art  never 
is ;  though  it  may  busy  itself  with  far  humbler 
persons  and  objects  than  Mr.  Trollope  does, 
may  confine  itself  even  more  strictly  than  he 
does  to  purely  ordinary  occurrences,  may  shun 
the  exceptional,  the  bizarre,  the  outriy  as  rigidly 
as  Miss  Austen  herself.  Indeed,  there  is  a  very 
short  road  to  vulgarity  by  affecting  these  last 
three  things ;  and  I  think  since  Mr.  Trollope's 
time  it  has  been  pretty  frequently  trodden  by 
those  who  are  hastening  to  the  same  goal  of 
comparative  oblivion  which,  I  fear,  he  has  al- 
ready reached. 


12 


XIX. 

MR.  WILLIAM   MORRIS. 

T  THINK  it  probable  that  no  long  poem  has 
-■-  for  many  years  —  indeed,  since  the  disuse 
of  buying  such  poems  by  tens  of  thousands  in 
the  days  of  our  grandfathers  —  sold  so  well  as 
"The  Earthly  Paradise";  and  I  believe  that, 
though  none  of  Mr.  Morris's  subsequent  works 
has  equalled  this  in  popularity,  they  have  none 
of  them  lacked  a  fair  vogue.  Yet  it  has  always 
seemed  to  me  that  not  merely  the  general,  but 
even  the  critical  public  ranks  him  far  below  his 
proper  station  as  a  poet 

The  way  in  which  I  made  my  own  first 
acquaintance  with  him  was  very  odd;  and  I 
have  never  been  able  fully  to  explain  it.  As 
a  boy  of  certainly  not  more  than  fourteen  I  used, 
like  other  boys,  to  take  in  periodicals  addressed 
pueris  if  not  virginibus,  and  in  one  of  these,  the 
title  of  which  I  cannot  remember,  I  can  very 


Mr.  "William  Morris.  179 

distinctly  mind  me  of  seeing  an  editorial  notice 
of  a  poem  which  had  been  sent  in,  dealing  with 
a  "  tall  white  maid  "  and  other  things  and  per- 
sons. This  poem  was,  as  I  afterwards  found 
out,  and  as  all  Morrisians  will  recognize,  "  The 
Sailing  of  the  Sword,"  which  must  just  have 
appeared,  or  have  been  just  about  to  appear,  in 
Mr.  Morris's  first  volume,  "  The  Defence  of 
Guinevere."  This  volume  came  out  in  1858,  — 
an  annus  mirabilis,  in  which  some  of  the  best 
wine  of  the  century  was  made  on  the  Douro, 
and  in  the  Gironde,  and  on  the  C6te  d'Or,  and 
which  seems  to  have  exercised  a  very  remark- 
able influence  on  the  books  and  persons  born 
in  it.  The  persons  of  1858  had  a  singular  knack 
of  being  clever  or  charming,  or  both;  and  the 
books  (as  biographers  and  bibliographers  have 
before  noticed)  were  unusually  epoch-making. 

Of  these  I  do  not  myself  rank  "  The  Defence 
of  Guinevere  "  least  high.  "  The  Sailing  of  the 
Sword  "  —  the  manner  of  the  insertion  of  which 
in  my  Boys^  Magazine,  or  whatever  it  was  called, 
remains  an  insoluble  mystery  to  me  —  is,  no 
doubt,  not  one  of  the  best.     But  I  remember 


i8o  Corrected  Impressions. 

when  some  years  afterwards  I  bought  the  little 
brown  book  — nightingale-colour  —  from  Slatter 
and  Rose's  counter  at  Oxford  for  a  price  which 
would  not  buy  it  now,  that  I  took  it  back  to  my 
rooms  and  read  it  straight  through  with  an 
ecstasy  of  relish  not  surpassed  by  anything 
I  have  ever  known  of  the  kind.  Persons  of 
sober  and  classical  tastes  fought  very  shy  of 
*'  Guinevere  "  at  her  first  appearance ;  and  even 
some  of  those  who  loved  her  then  have  fallen 
off  now.  Why  should  a  man  speak  about  a 
"  choosing-cloth  "  ?  What  were  these  strange 
scraps  of  mediaeval  French  ?  Who  could  make 
sense  of  "The  Blue  Closet"  or  "Two  Red 
Roses  across  the  Moon"?  Indeed,  this  latter 
very  harmless  and  spirited  ditty  —  of  which  I 
once  offered  to  write  a  symbolic  defence  in  any 
required  number  of  pages,  and  which  I  still  love 
wildly  —  had  the  faculty  of  simply  infuriating 
the  grave  and  precise.  Oxford  and  Cambridge 
have  not  in  my  time  produced  better  scholars, 
who  are  also  humourists,  or  humourists  who  are 
also  scholars,  than  the  present  Sir  Frederick 
Pollock  and  the  present  Bishop   of  Colombo. 


Mr.  William   Morris.  i8i 

and  I  believe  it  to  be  no  improper  revealing  of 
secrets  to  say  that  they  both  at  least  used  to 
abominate  it.  Perhaps  (I  hope  so)  they  do  not 
now.  As  for  the  incident,  when  the  orange  fell 
"And  in  came  marching  the  ghosts  of  those 
who  were  slain  at  the  war,"  I  should  like  to 
bring  up  the  men  from  the  south  gate  and  have 
a  fleet  horse  ready  at  that  postern,  before  setting 
it  even  now  before  some  very  respectable  per- 
sons. And  then  it  would  have  been  more  dan- 
gerous still. 

For  my  part  I  loved  the  book  at  once  with 
a  love  full-grown  and  ardent;  nor  do  I  think 
that  that  love  has  decreased  an  inch  in  stature 
or  a  degree  in  heat  since.  Of  course  there 
are  very  obvious  faults  and  foibles.  The  ar- 
chaic mannerism  may  be  here  and  there  over- 
done, even  in  the  eyes  of  those  who  are  well 
enough  inclined  thereto;  the  attention  to  pic- 
torial and  to  musical  effect  may  sometimes  seem 
paid  at  the  expense  of  sense.  The  title-poem 
is  in  parts  obscure  and  wordy;  "Sir  Peter 
Harpdon's  End,"  another  most  important  piece, 
would  gain  a  great  deal  by  cutting  down ;  the 


1 82  Corrected  Impressions. 

expression  sometimes  lacks  crispness  and  finish; 
the  verse  is  sometimes  facile  and  lax.  But  all 
this  is  redeemed  and  more  than  redeemed  by 
the  presence  of  the  real,  the  true,  the  indefin- 
able and  unmistakable  spirit  of  poetry.  And 
this  spirit  wears,  as  it  does  at  all  its  more 
remarkable  appearances  in  the  world,  a  distinct 
and  novel  dress.  Although  the  so-called  Ro- 
mantic movement  had  been  going  on  more  or 
less  for  a  hundred  years — had  been  going  on 
vigorously  and  decidedly  for  sixty  or  seventy 
—  when  Mr.  Morris  wrote,  only  one  or  two 
snatches  of  Coleridge  and  Keats  had  caught  the 
peculiar  mediaeval  tone  which  the  Pras-Raphael- 
ites  in  poetry,  following  the  Prae-Raphaelites  in 
art,  were  now  about  to  sound.  Even  "  La  Belle 
Dame  Sans  Merci,"  that  wonderful  divination 
in  which  Keats  hit  upon  the  true  and  very 
mediaeval,  as  elsewhere  upon  the  true  and  very 
classical  spirit,  is  an  exception,  a  casual  in- 
spiration rather  than  a  full  reflection.  And 
let  it  be  remembered  that  when  Mr.  Morris 
began  to  write,  the  brother  poets  (who  after- 
wards a  little  eclipsed  him,  perhaps,  both  with 


Mr.  William   Morris.  183 

the  public  and  the  critics)  had  published  nothing 
(though  Mr.  Rossetti's  sugared  sonnets  might 
be  handed  about  among  his  private  friends), 
and  that  the  painter  who  is  more  than  any  one 
Mr.  Morris's  yoke-fellow,  Sir  Edward  Burne- 
Jones,  was  hardly  out  of  leading-strings. 

"  The  Defence  of  Guinevere,"  indeed,  was  not 
Mr.  Morris's  first,  not  even  his  first  published, 
work.  He  contributed  largely  to  that  very 
remarkable  and  now  very  inaccessible  miscel- 
lany, The  Oxford  and  Catnbridge  Magazine,  his 
chief  work  being,  I  believe,  a  delightful  romance 
called  "  The  Hollow  Land,"  which  I  read,  all 
unknowing  its  authorship,  at  the  age  of  sixteen, 
and  liked,  but  not  to  loving.  "The  Hollow 
Land  "  was,  as  I  remember  it,  after  more  than 
thirty  years,  a  little,  a  very  little,  incoherent 
and  apocalyptic  —  with  painters  who  painted 
God's  judgments  in  purple  and  crimson,  and 
a  heroine  of  the  appropriate  name  of  Swan- 
hilda.  I  decline  to  recognize  any  real  incohe- 
rency  in  "  The  Defence  of  Guinevere."  The 
whole  book  is,  of  course,  saturated  with  the 
spirit  of  the  Arthurian  legends,  of  which  I  be- 


184  Corrected  Impressions. 

lieve  Mr.  Morris  was  even  then  a  great  student, 
both  in  French  and  in  English.  Nor  do  I  think 
that  any  one  who  does  not  know  the  originals, 
and  has  not  gone  through  a  considerable  study 
of  mediaeval  romance,  can  fully  estimate  the 
marvellous  manner  in  which  he  has  not  merely 
galvanized  or  copied,  but  revivified  and  recreated 
the  tone  and  sense  of  them.  For — the  warn- 
ing has  often  been  given,  but  it  wants  repetition 
still  —  it  is  quite  a  mistake  to  think  that  either 
Scott  earlier,  or  Lord  Tennyson  later,  effected 
this  revivification,  magnificent  as  the  work  of 
both  is.  Scott  was  an  ardent  lover  of  the  Mid- 
dle Ages ;  but  he  was,  after  all,  a  man  born  well 
within  the  eighteenth  century.  Tennyson  had 
read  his  Mallory  faithfully;  but  he  was  not 
born  much  within  the  nineteenth.  It  took  the 
work  of  these  very  men  to  create  the  atmos- 
phere —  to  get  ready  the  stage  —  in  which  and 
on  which  Mr.  Morris  and  Sir  Edward  Burne- 
Jones  could  appear. 

That  stage,  that  atmosphere,  must  always, 
I  suppose,  find  a  public  either  enthusiastic  in 
welcome  or  vehement  in  refusal.     It  is  not  easy 


Mr.  William  Morris.  185 

to  be  merely  indifferent  to  the  works  of  these 
artists,  though  it  is  possible  merely  to  gape  at 
them  in  uncomprehending  wonder.  "Pastiche" 
will  cry  the  one  side ;  "unmeaning  and  overdone 
archaism;  sentimental  maundering;  indiffer- 
ence to  the  gains  and  the  aims  of  modernism; 
art  too  literary ;  literature  too  pictorial ;  illiberal 
and  pusillanimous  relapse  on  a  mainly  imagi- 
nary past;  deficiency  in  realism;  reliance  on 
trick  and  cliche^  I  may  be  excused  from  set- 
ting in  array  against  these  terms  of  excessive 
and  uncritical  depreciation  a  counter  list  of 
equally  excessive  appreciation  and  praise.  But 
I  think  myself  that  the  school  in  question  — 
especially  the  poet  and  the  painter  just  coupled 
—  have  discovered,  or  rather  rediscovered,  the 
way  to  one  of  the  Paradises  of  Art,  of  which 
I  shall  not  say  much  more  in  this  place  than 
that  to  my  judgment  it  seems  a  true  and  gen- 
uine Paradise,  and,  to  my  taste,  one  delicious 
and  refreshing  to  an  extent  not  excelled  by  any 
other.  To  me  personally,  no  other  division  of 
literature  or  of  art  has  the  qualities  of  a  "  Vale 
of  Rest"  as  mediaeval  literature  and  mediaeval 


1 86  Corrected  Impressions. 

art  have ;  while  the  renaissance  of  both,  at  the 
hands  of  Mr.  Morris  and  his  friends,  seems  to 
me  a  true  renaissance,  not  by  any  means  a 
copy,  possessing  the  quahties  of  its  originals 
in  a  slightly  altered  and  perhaps  even  more 
effective  form. 

It  has  a  fashion  of  delight,  standing  in  the 
most  marked  and  interesting  contrast  with  those 
fashions  which  may  be  noticed  in  other  poets  of 
the  period.  Like  the  Tennysonian  charm,  it  is 
dreamlike ;  but  the  character  of  the  dreams  is 
distinct.  There  is  more  action,  more  story,  in 
them ;  and  at  the  same  time  there  is  a  double 
and  treble  dose  of  the  vague  and  the  mystical 
in  colour,  form,  and  sound.  In  Tennyson  there 
is  still  a  sort  of  remnant  of  eighteenth-century 
netted,  of  classical  clearness  of  outline.  It  is 
only  with  Mr.  Morris  and  his  friends  or  follow- 
ers that  we  get  into  the  true  Romantic  vague. 
When  Mr.  Lang  selected  Mr.  Morris  as  the  chief 
English  example  of  poetry  which  oversteps  the 
border  line  between  mere  sound  and  sense, 
he  did  justly.  But  it  is  also  necessary  to  take 
count   in   Mr.    Morris    of  that   extraordinarily 


Mr.  William  Morris.  187 

decorative  spirit  which  always  makes  him  ac- 
company his  music  with  limning.  He  is  the 
very  embodiment  of  mediaeval  poetry  as  we  ,^^^--^ 
meet  it  in  the  well  known  opening  of  the  ^-f 
"  Romance  of  the  Rose  "  and  a  thousand  other 
places,  —  a  noise  of  musical  instruments  accom- 
panying an  endless  procession  of  allegorical  or 
purely  descriptive  imagery.  Between  William 
of  Lorris  and  William  Morris  there  are  six 
hundred  years  of  time,  a  single  letter  in  spell- 
ing, and  in  spirit  only  a  greater  genius,  the 
possession  of  a  happier  instrument  of  language, 
and  a  larger  repertory  of  subject  and  style  in 
the  later  singer. 


f 


XX. 

MR.   WILLIAM   MORRIS   {concluded). 

THERE  are  certain  of  one's  literary  as  of 
one's  other  loves  the  progress  of  which 
is  not  wholly  satisfactory  to  a  person  of  sensi- 
bility. There  may  be  no  actual  "  writing  out;  " 
no  positive  and  undeniable  deterioration;  but 
"the  second  temple  is  not  like  the  first,"  later 
pressures  do  not  repeat  the  effect  of  the  first 
sprightly  runnings.  I  at  least  have  never  felt 
this  with  Mr.  William  Morris.  I  never  met  him 
in  the  flesh,  or  exchanged  letters  with  him,  or 
heard  very  much  about  him  personally;  and 
si  quid  id  est,  I  think  his  politics  very  nearly 
childish,  and  much  more  than  very  nearly 
mischievous.  But  I  know  no  man  of  letters 
of  my  time  who  has  been  so  thoroughly  sat- 
isfactory all  through  to  the  critical  lover  of 
letters.  To  the  critical  lover,  I  say  advisedly 
And  yet   it   must  be   not   quite   the   ordinary 


Mr.  William  Morris.  189 

sort  of  critic  who  shall  do  Mr.  Morris  full 
justice.  For  his  faults  are  exactly  of  those 
which  the  critic  who  looks  only  at  the  stop- 
watch will  least  pardon;  and  his  merits  are 
perhaps  of  those  which  the  critic  who  looks 
only  at  the  stop-watch  will  least  appreciate. 

In  the  last  division  of  this  paper  I  have  given 
some  remarks  on  his  work  as  it  appeared  up  to 
and  including  "  The  Defence  of  Guinevere." 
His  next  stroke  was  a  stroke  of  genius,  and  it 
was,  also,  as  strokes  of  genius  are  not  always,  a 
stroke  of  good  luck.  The  hubbub  about  Mr. 
Swinburne's  "  Poems  and  Ballads  "  had  made 
general  and  popular  what  had  before  been  only 
partial  and  esoteric,  —  an  interest  in  the  new 
schools  of  Prae-Raphaelite  art  and  letters  which 
had  already  fixed  in  various  ways  strong  holds 
on  the  Universities,  especially  Oxford.  But 
"  The  Life  and  Death  of  Jason,  a  Poem  by 
William  Morris,  London,  Bell  and  Daldy,  1867," 
which  lies  beside  me  with  its  red  buckram 
weathered  to  orange  on  the  back,  but  otherwise 
much  as  I  bought  it  at  its  earliest  appearance, 
hit  the  bird  on  both  wings.     It  gave  a  perfect 


ipo  Corrected  Impressions. 

Romantic  treatment.  It  chose  a  perfect  classi- 
cal subject.  It  was  not  possible,  as  it  has  been 
since,  for  any  one  to  accuse  the  artist  of  too 
much  archaic  mannerism  in  the  mediaeval  and 
Scandinavian  manner;  it  was  not  possible,  on 
the  other  side,  for  any  one  not  to  recognize 
that  here  was  an  almost  entirely  new  fashion 
of  telling  a  story  in  verse.  It  was  new,  but 
it  was  not  ancestorless ;  few  things  are.  It 
had  in  its  genealogy  not  merely  Keats,  but 
Wither  and  Browne.  But  the  result,  as  hap- 
pens sometimes  in  well-bred  steeds,  was  a 
far  more  spirited  and  individual  product  than 
any  of  its  forbears.  Mr.  Morris  did  to  the 
heroic  couplet  what  Milton  and  Wordsworth 
did  to  blank  verse.  He  broke  it  up,  changed 
its  centres  of  gravity,  subjected  it  to  endless 
varieties  of  enjambement  or  overlapping.  It 
was  his  main  care  to  end  a  paragraph,  to  be- 
gin a  speech,  in  the  middle  of  a  couplet  or 
a  line.  Yet  he  never  was  harsh,  and  he  was 
seldom  —  he  was  sometimes  —  over  fluent.  The 
thing  took  by  storm  that  portion  of  the  public 
which   has   scholarship  as  well   as  taste.     And 


Mr.  William   Morris.  191 

it  deserved  to  take  it.  I  do  not  think  my- 
self that  there  is  any  one  passage  quite  so  ex- 
quisite in  it  as  the  "  Nymph's  Song  to  Hylas," 
which  Mr.  Morris  (either  desirous  not  to  let 
it  be  whelmed  in  a  long  narrative,  or  trying 
experiments  on  the  public  memory)  republished 
twenty  years  after  in  "  Songs  by  the  Way."  But 
it  is  all  more  or  less  exquisite,  and  it  was  then 
all  more  or  less  novel. 

It  was  soon  to  be  to  a  certain  extent  anti- 
quated by  a  more  splendid  production  from  the 
same  hand.  I  really  do  not  know  that  anything 
combining  bulk  and  excellence  to  the  same 
extent  as  "The  Earthly  Paradise"  had  ap- 
peared since  Dryden's  "  Fables,"  and  the  "  Fa- 
bles" are  but  small  in  bulk  compared  to  the 
"  Paradise." 

A  Paradise  it  certainly  is.  It  had  been  her- 
alded on  the  fly-leaves  of  "Jason,"  and  again 
in  its  own  earlier  volumes,  not  quite  in  the  form 
which  it  finally  assumed.  I  have  been  told  that 
all  the  defaulting  tales  exist,  and  I  would  I  had 
them.  For  nothing  is  wrong  in  this  enormous 
work.     If  it  is  sometimes  voluble,   it  is  never 


igz  Corrected  Impressions. 

prosaic ;  the  setting-pieces,  intercalated  prefaces, 
aod  epilogues  for  the  several  months,  are  as 
tl>ey  should  be,  of  the  very  best;  the  proem 
is  noble ;  and  the  general  contents  are  sublime. 
It  is  hard  to  seek  among  the  two  dozen  for  the 
best  where  all  are  good.  For  mere  personal 
liking  I  should  choose,  I  think,  "  The  Man  born 
to  be  King"  (which  is  worth  comparing  with 
the  simplicity  of  the  old  French  story),  "The 
Doom  of  King  Acrisius,"  with  the  gorgeous 
sweep  of  its  rendering  of  the  Perseus  legend, 
"  The  Watching  of  the  Falcon "  (a  great  ser- 
mon on  a  great  text),  "  The  Land  East  of  the 
Sun  and  West  of  the  Moon  "  (an  ideal  Romantic 
tale),  its  immediate  forerunner,  *'  The  Death  of 
Paris"  (which  will  bear  comparison  with  the 
early  and  late  work  of  Tennyson  himself),  and 
lastly  "  The  Ring  given  to  Venus  "  and  "  The 
Hill  of  Venus,"  the  first  of  which  pair  contains, 
in  the  procession  of  the  dead  Gods  from  sea 
to  land,  perhaps  the  very  finest  thing  that  Mr. 
Morris  has  ever  done.  If  only  Sir  Edward 
Burne-Jones  would  take  it  for  a  subject! 
I  suppose  there  is  no  douce  and  reasonable 


Mr.  William  Morris.  193 

Morrisian  who  will  deny  that  "  The  Earthly 
Paradise"  marks  the  apogee  of  its  writer's 
talent.  But  it  is  really  surprising  to  find  how 
flat  the  trajectory  of  his  genius  is,  how  little 
he  has  declined  from  this  its  culmination.  I 
have  myself  heard  "  Love  is  Enough  "  criticised 
in  the  statement  that  "  Love  is  n't  enough  " ;  but 
this  is  a  clear  ignoratio  elenchi.  The  transla- 
tions, prose  and  verse,  have  perhaps  attracted 
more  unfavorable  criticism  than  any  other  part 
of  the  work ;  and  although  I  am  not  competent 
to  decide  whether  Mr.  Morris's  sagas  are  or  are 
not  unfaithful  to  their  original,  I  can  most 
frankly  admit  that  Mr.  Morris's  "^Eneid"  is 
not  exactly  Virgil,  and  Mr.  Morris's  "  Odyssey  " 
still  less  exactly  Homer.  But  it  really  seems 
unnecessary  to  fight  over  again  the  endless 
battle  of  Translation  v.  Original.  The  transla- 
tion is  never  the  original,  and  Mr.  Morris's  sub- 
stitutes are  a  great  deal  better  than  most  But 
"  Sigurd,"  at  a  time  of  life  when  the  poetic  tide 
often  runs  low  in  a  man,  showed  that  Mr.  Morris 
was  as  good  at  practically  original  work  as  ever. 
Indeed,  I  hardly  know  another  instance  of  a 
13 


194  Corrected  Impressions. 

poet  well  advanced  in  years,  if  not  old,  who 
attempted  a  new  and  very  dangerous  metre 
with  such  extraordinary  success.  Once  get  the 
secret  of  this  cunning  mixture  of  anapaests  and 
trochees,  and  the  varying  and  voluble  melody 
of  it  will  simply  amaze  you. 

The  last  collection  of  poems  proper,  "  Songs 
by  the  Way,"  contains  chiefly  gleanings  of  older 
years;  and  with  many  dehghtful  things  (espe- 
cially the  incomparable  "  Meeting  in  Winter ") 
includes  a  good  deal  of  Mr.  Morris's  very 
Colonel-Newcome-like  politics.  But  a  few  years 
ago  the  indefatigable  poet  entered  on  a  new 
course.  It  must  be  admitted  that  the  most 
ingeniously  perverse  undergraduate  could  not 
have  selected  anything  more  likely  to  "  disgust 
the  examiners "  than  the  types,  etc.,  of  "  The 
House  of  the  Wolfings."  Whenever  —  which 
is  often  —  I  have  a  mind  to  read  over  the 
"Wood  Sun's"  perfectly  exquisite  forecast  of 
Thiodulf's  fate,  —  the  best  piece  of  English 
poetry  published  for  these  ten  years  past  except 
"  Crossing  the  Bar,"  —  I  have  to  lay  my  ac- 
count with  a  pair  of  smarting  eyes  for  the  rest 


Mr.  William  Morris.  195 

of  the  evening.  But  in  this,  and  in  "  The  Roots 
of  the  Mountains,"  and  most  of  all  in  "  The 
Glittering  Plain,"  we  have  what  before  Mr. 
Morris  even  Kingsley  never  quite  achieved,  true 
sagas,  not  in  the  least  mosaics  or  pastiches  from 
the  sagas  proper,  but  "  sets  "  or  "  cuttings " 
from  them,  instinct  with  genuine  life,  and  repro- 
ducing with  due  variation  the  character  of  the 
parent  stock. 

In  other  words,  we  have  in  Mr.  Morris  what 
we  have  not  had  since  Chaucer,  and  what  no 
other  nation  has  had  since  a  time  older  than 
Chaucer's,  a  real  trouv^re  of  the  first  class  —  a 
person  of  inexhaustible  fertility  and  power  in 
weaving  the  verse  and  the  prose  of  romance, 
and  with  a  purely  lyrical  gift  which  even 
Chaucer  did  not  often  show.  It  is  the  quality 
of  poetry  —  much  more  than  the  particular 
forms  or  the  agreeable  volume  in  which  it 
manifests  itself — that  has  always  attracted  me, 
and  attracts  me  now  as  much  as  ever  to  this 
very  remarkable  writer.  The  quality  of  poetry 
is  apt  to  be,  if  not  strained,  drowned  when  it 
comes  to  be  written  by  the  ten,  the  fifty,  the 


196  Corrected  Impressions. 

hundred  thousand  verses.  I  have  made  no 
laboured  calculation ;  but  I  really  think  that  Mr. 
Morris  cannot  be  very  far  off,  if  he  has  not 
actually  reached  or  passed,  the  hundred  thou- 
sand limit.  He  cannot  be  said  to  be  quite  free 
from  the  faults  of  such  prolixity,  the  loose 
fluent  phrase,  the  easy  amble  of  movement, 
the  watered  and  undistinguished  description. 
And  yet  you  shall  never  read  many  pages, 
seldom  many  lines  of  his,  without  finding  side  by 
side  with  these  negligences  the  unmistakable 
marks  which  a  poet,  and  only  a  poet,  impresses 
on  his  work.  From  "  The  Defence  of  Guine- 
vere "  to  the  snatches  in  his  latest  prose  works 
he  has  these  marks,  in  phrase,  in  music,  in  sug- 
gestion. And  still,  charming  as  are  many  of 
the  detached  pieces  to  be  culled  from  him, 
the  atmosphere  and  the  tenor  of  the  whole 
seem  to  me  to  be  more  poetical  than  any  of  the 
parts.  All  over  it  is  that  "  making  the  common 
as  though  it  were  not  common"  which  is  the 
best  if  not  the  only  existing  definition  of  this 
indefinable  quality. 

So,  when  I  see  in  the  work  of  certain  writers 


Mr.  William   Morris.  197 

whom  it  is  unnecessary  to  name,  and  whom  I 
do  not  allude  to  otherwise  than  for  the  sake 
of  honour,  the  falling  back  on  strained  expres- 
sion, on  flashes  of  poetical  epigram  and  conun- 
drum, on  scrambles  after  the  grand  style  and 
fumblings  after  the  marmoreal,  I  turn  with  relief 
once  more  to  the  lambent  easy  light,  the  misty 
lunar  atmosphere  shot  with  faint  auroral  col- 
ours, the  low  and  magical  music,  the  ever-vary- 
ing panorama  of  poetical  description  and  pas- 
sion and  thought  that  I  have  known  so  long, 
and  loved  so  much,  in  the  writings  of  the  author 
of  "  The  Earthly  Paradise." 


XXL 

MR.   RUSKIN. 

AFTER  the  havoc  that  has  been  made  dur- 
ing the  last  four  or  five  years  in  the 
ranks  of  the  great  seniors  of  English  Literature 
there  is,  perhaps,  but  one  name  left,  if  indeed 
there  be  one,  who  shares  the  first  class,  in 
merit  and  seniority  combined,  with  that  of  Mr. 
Ruskin.  There  is  certainly  none  which  has 
seen,  during  the  lifetime  of  its  owner,  such 
curious  vicissitudes  of  popular  repute.  It 
will  soon  be,  if  it  is  not  already,  fifty  years 
since  "  A  Graduate  of  Oxford "  arose  to 
admonish  the  British  nation  of  its  sins  and 
shortcomings  in  the  matter  of  art  and  appre- 
ciation of  art.  For  some  ten  years  or  more 
after  that,  Mr.  Ruskin  was  a  voice  crying  in 
the  wilderness,  but  attracting  more  and  more 
younger  voices  to  go  and  cry  after  him.  For 
about   twenty   subsequent  to   this  first  decade 


Mr.   Ruskin. 


99 


he  was  a  power,  in  some  of  his  innumerable 
lines  sweeping  public  taste  more  or  less  with 
or  before  him.  And  then  the  inevitable 
reaction  which  generally  waits  till  after  a 
man's  death,  but  which  in  his  case  was  has- 
tened by  certain  oddities  of  his  own  whereon 
more  must  be  said  hereafter,  set  in  with  more 
than  its  usual  severity.  Young  England,  once 
Mr.  Ruskin's  disciple  in  art,  has  accomplished 
in  regard  to  him  the  denial  of  St,  Peter  without 
St.  Peter's  repentance.  It  knows  not  the  man ; 
it  will  have  none  of  him ;  it  calls  his  favourite 
ideas  "  the  Ruskinian  heresy,"  and  labours  to 
set  up  some  quite  different  thing  from  Ruskin- 
ism.  And  all  the  while,  to  those  outsiders  who 
can  look  coolly  at  the  game,  it  is  perfectly 
obvious  that  the  blasphemers  of  Mr.  Ruskin 
never  could,  metaphysically  speaking,  have 
come  into  existence  but  for  Mr.  Ruskin  him-', 
self;  and  that  they  are,  according  to  the  well- 
known  custom  of  certain  savage  tribes,  eating 
their  father. 

I  think  I  may  speak  without  too  great  pre- 
sumption  for  these  outsiders.      I   have   never 


200  Corrected  Impressions. 

been  a  Ruskinite,  though  I  have  always 
thought  that  nobody  in  our  time  has  touched 
Mr.  Ruskin  at  his  very  best  as  an  artist  in 
the  flamboyant  variety  of  English  prose;  and 
I  have  never  been  an  anti-Ruskinite,  though 
I  know  perfectly  well  what  the  anti-Ruskinites 
mean  by  their  fault-finding,  and  even  to  a 
certain  extent  agree  with  it.  When  Mr.  Rus- 
kin began,  as  above  remarked,  to  cry  in 
the  wilderness,  it  must  be  admitted  by  every 
one  who  gives  himself  the  trouble  to  know, 
that  he  had  a  very  great  and  terrible  wilderness 
to  cry  in.  I  have  never,  being  as  has  been  said 
a  hopeless  outsider,  been  able  to  acquiesce  in 
the  stereotyped  opinion  (accepted  docilely  by 
a  dozen  generations  of  young  would-be  rebels) 
that  Paris  is  an  artistic  Jerusalem,  and  London 
an  artistic  Samaria.  But  in  the  second  quarter 
of  this  century  we  were  in  rather  a  bad  way 
artistically.  We  had  Turner  (who  was  certainly 
a  host,  though  a  very  undisciplined  host,  in 
himself),  we  had  Etty  (who  has  always  seemed 
to  me  the  prophet  in  art  who  has  had  least 
honour  in  this  his  own  country),  and  we   had 


Mr.   Ruskin.  201 

some  others.  But  for  sheer  ugliness  and  lack 
of  artistic  feeling  in  almost  all  respects,  the  reign 
of  William  the  Fourth  and  the  first  twenty- 
years  or  so  of  the  reign  of  her  present  gracious 
Majesty  made  what  has  been  subsequently 
termed  a  "  record  "  in  English  history.  Archi- 
tecture had  begun  to  feel  a  well-intentioned 
but  by  no  means  always  wisely  directed  revival ; 
music,  painting,  most  sculpture,  almost  all 
books,  furniture,  plate  and  domestic  supdlex 
generally  exhibited  a  perfectly  hopeless  level 
of  middle-class  banality.  I  do  not  know  that 
matters  have  in  all  ways  improved  since. 
With  some  things  that  are  much  better  we 
have  had  many  things  that  are  much  worse. 
We  have  had  the  vicious  popularisation  of  cheap 
machine-made  art ;  we  have  had  execrable  vul- 
garities, we  have  had  cant  and  affectation  and 
pastiche.  But,  whereas  from  the  thirties  to  the 
sixties,  it  was  almost  impossible  to  buy  any- 
thing new  that  was  not  complacently  hideous, 
from  the  sixties  to  the  nineties  it  has  always 
been  possible  to  buy  something  new  that  was 
at  least  graceful  in  intention. 


202  Corrected  Impressions. 

And  this  was  more  the  doing  of  Mr.  Ruskin 
than  of  any  single  man.  Of  course,  nothing 
of  the  kind  is  ever  the  doing  of  any  single  man. 
The  Oxford  Movement,  the  Prse-Raphaelites, 
the  '51  Exhibition, —  a  horrid  thing  in  itself, 
—  the  increasing  custom  of  travel  abroad,  and 
a  dozen  other  things  not  only  helped,  but  did 
much  more  than  any  man  could  do.  But  Mr. 
Ruskin  did  as  much  as  any  man  could  do; 
and  that  is  a  good  deal.  He  had  perfect 
leisure,  a  considerable  fortune,  a  wonderful 
literary  faculty,  an  intense  love  for  art.  He 
was  gifted  by  nature  with  what  is  the  most 
fortunate  gift  for  a  man  of  genius,  the  most 
unfortunate  for  another,  an  entire  freedom 
from  the  malady  of  self-criticism.  It  has 
never  during  his  long  career  ever  troubled  Mr. 
Ruskin  to  bethink  himself  whether  he  knew 
what  he  was  talking  about,  whether  he  was  or 
was  not  talking  nonsense,  whether  he  was  or 
was  not  contradicting  flatly  something  that  he 
had  said  before.  This  is  a  great  advantage 
for  a  prophet  in  these  or  any  times;  and 
Mr.  Ruskin  had  it. 


Mr.   Ruskin.  203 


With  such  gifts  he  set  himself  to  work  to  beat 
up  the  quarters  of  British  Philistia,  first  in  the 
department  of  art,  and  then  in  many  another. 
At  first  he  used  Turner  and  the  Prae-Raphael- 
ites  for  his  battering-rams ;  then  he  was  for  a 
season  wholly  Venetian ;  then  he  spread  himself 
widely  into  political  economy  and  philosophis- 
ings  of  all  kinds;  then  he  erected  a  sort  of 
private  pulpit,  and  in  "Fors  Clavigera"  and 
other  things  made  almost  a  religion  of  his  own 
idiosyncrasy;  then,  as  all  men  know,  he  estab- 
lished himself  at  his  own  University  and  led 
men  captive,  as  an  irreverent  one  phrased  it, 
by  "  road-making  and  rigmarole."  Then  a  fresh 
band  of  Philistines,  masquerading  as  the  cir- 
cumcision of  Art  itself,  set  upon  him  and  cried 
shame  upon  his  version  of  aesthetics,  and  found 
fault  with  the  imperfection  of  his  technique,  and 
urged  Millet  against  Turner,  and  flung  studio 
jargon  against  lecture-room  mysticism.  And 
meanwhile,  oddly  enough,  his  despised,  and  I 
must  say  I  think  rather  despicable,  Political 
Economy  won  the  ground  that  his  aesthetics 
had  lost;  and  all  or  half  of  our  socialists  and 


204  Corrected  Impressions. 


semi-socialists  nowadays  talk  "  Unto  this  Last," 
without  its  mysticism  or  its  eloquence,  and  with 
twice  its  unreason. 

A  most  odd  career:  not  exactly  paralleled, 
so  far  as  I  can  remember,  and  chequered  by 
many  things  which  in  this  rapid  sketch  I  have 
had  to  leave  out,  such  as  the  singular  and  very 
important  relations  of  Mr.  Ruskin  to  Carlyle. 
A  career  on  which,  no  doubt,  the  anathema  of 
the  most  distinguished  of  Mr.  Ruskin's  own 
Oxford  contemporaries  may  be  pronounced 
to  the  effect  that  it  is  "fantastic  and  lacks 
sanity  "  ;  which  may  be  called  (if  anybody  likes) 
a  kind  of  failure ;  but  which  has  influenced 
England  in  a  vast  number  of  different  ways 
as  the  career  of  no  other  man  living  or  lately 
dead  has  influenced  it. 

It  is  extremely  difficult  to  criticise  Mr.  Rus- 
^kin,  if  only  for  the  very  simple  reason  that, 
as  has  been  remarked  already,  he  has  never 
condescended  to  criticise  himself.  He  once 
characteristically  boasted  that  he  "had  never 
withdrawn  a  sentence,  written  since  i860,  as 
erroneous  in  principle."     In   i860  Mr.  Ruskin 


Mr.   Ruskin.  205 


was  nearly  forty,  and  we  are  to  suppose  (which, 
indeed,  is  self-evident  from  the  complete  re- 
casting of  the  earlier  volumes  of  "  Modern 
Painters  ")  that  there  was  a  good  deal  to  with- 
draw before  that.  But  the  fact  is  that,  dis- 
owned  or  not  disowned,  all  his  work  in  reality 
bears  the  same  marks,  —  an  intense  love  of 
beauty;  a  restless  desire  to  theorise  on  beauti- 
ful objects ;  a  vivid  imagination  ;  a  rather  weak 
logical  gift ;  a  strong  but  capricious  moral  sense ; 
a  knack  of  succumbing  to  any  tempting  current 
theory;  a  marvellous  command  of  eloquent 
prose;  and,  as  must  be  constantly  repeated, 
an  utter  absence  of  critical  faculty  properly  so 
(_^called. 

Such  a  combination  with  such  faculties  of 
expressing  it  must  needs  produce  work  as  dis- 
concerting as  it  is  stimulating.  In  his  inequal- 
ities of  style  Mr.  Ruskin  is  very  much  at  one 
with  all  practitioners  of  prose  during  this  cent- 
ury, and  with  most  during  others.  But  where 
he  is  almost  unique  is  in  his  inequalities  of 
thought  and  matter,  Landor,  who  is  his  most 
easily  suggested  analogue  in  this,  is  not  really 


2o6  Corrected  Impressions. 

a  parallel :  for  Lander's  thought  is  never  good 
for  much,  it  is  at  best  not  contemptible,  and 
presents  a  decent  standard  tradition  from  the 
classics.  Mr.  Ruskin's  is,  for  the  most  part, 
purely  original  (with  the  suggestions  and  adop- 
tions above  noted),  and  at  times  it  has  really 
marvellous  vigour,  felicity,  and  truth.  At 
others,  and  just  as  often,  it  borders  on  sheer 
nonsense.  It  is  customary  to  sneer  at  the 
mystico-allegorical  theology  and  philosophy  of 
the  Middle  Ages.  But  those  who  sneer  for- 
get that  the  men  of  the  Schools  were  justi- 
fied by  the  simple  and  massive  theory  that 
their  scheme  of  divinity,  cosmology  and  an- 
thropology was  eternally  and  unavoidably  true, 
and  that  everything  not  merely  might,  but 
must,  be  brought  into  harmony  with  it.  Mr. 
Ruskin's  standards,  on  the  other  hand,  are  often 
mere  "  will-worship,"  ideas  which  he  has  casu- 
ally picked  up  in  the  state  of  hypothesis  from 
other  men,  and  which  he  erects  into  eternal 
truths. 

He  has,  for  instance,  been  reading  Mr.  Max 
Mijller,  and  he  promptly  reels  off  that  mar- 


Mr.  Ruskin.  207 


yellous  compound  of  ingenuity  and  folly,  "  The 
Queen  of  the  Air."  He  has  been  reading 
somebody  else,  and  he  produces  that  astonish- 
ing mixture  of  namby-pamby  guess-work  and 
suggestive  thought  entitled  *'  The  Ethics  of 
the  Dust."  Although  he  is  scarcely  ever 
wrong  in  admiration,  his  dislikes  are  so  capri- 
cious and  so  unreasonable,  that  one  is  almost 
safe  in  saying,  "When  Mr.  Ruskin  passes 
from  praise  to  blame  he  may,  as  a  rule,  be 
neglected."  Nothing  is  too  wild  for  him  to 
say  when  he  is  in  his  altitudes,  and  he  will 
gravely  propose  that  certain  goods,  such  as 
coals  and  petroleum,  shall  be  sent  about  only 
by  canal  traffic,  and  the  canal  boats  only  towed 
by  men,  because  "it  cannot  matter  whether 
they  get  to  their  destination  sooner  or  later." 
He  forgets,  of  course,  or  rather  disdains  to  con- 
sider, first,  that  in  certain  circumstances  men 
won't  tow  ;  and,  secondly,  that  if  some  coals  or 
petroleum  get  to  their  destination  slower  than 
other  petroleum  or  coals,  they  will  sell  for  less 
money  or  not  sell  at  all.  Although  the  youngest 
school  which  finds  most  fault  with  him  has  not. 


ao8  Corrected  Impressions. 

I  think,  much  locus  standi  for  objecting  to  him, 
as  whimsical  and  one-sided,  he  is  himself  un- 
doubtedly compact  of  whim,  and  it  would  not 
need  the  courage  of  a  Euclid  to  define  him 
as  "  a  body  with  one  side  only."  A  crotcheteer 
with  a  tongue  of  gold ;  an  enthusiastic  lover  of 
art  who  systematically  ignores  some  of  the  first 
laws  of  the  artist;  a  political  economist  who 
would  bankrupt  Eldorado  and  unsettle  Sparta; 
a  moralist  who  does  not  know  the  meaning  of 
fairness;  and  a  critic  who  does  not  know  the 
meaning  of  balance,  —  such  is  Mr.  Ruskin. 


XXII. 

MR.   RUSKIN   (concluded). 

I  "NOUGH  must  have  been  said  in  the  last 
-* — '  paper  of  the  singular  weaknesses  and 
contradictions  which  meet  us  everywhere  in 
Mr.  Ruskin.  It  remains  to  say  something  of 
their  probable  causes,  and  of  the  merits  which 
accompany,  and,  as  I  think,  far  outweigh  them, 
everywhere  but  in  his  dabblings  with  economics. 
The  sources  of  Mr.  Ruskin's  peculiarities, 
both  in  merit  and  defect,  appear  to  me  to  have 
lain  as  usual  in  his  nature,  and  to  have  been  de- 
veloped as  usual  by  his  education.  This  latter 
(as  in  the  case  of  that  other  eccentric  Camber- 
well  man,  Mr.  Browning)  was  of  a  home-keep- 
ing and  haphazard  kind,  very  different  from  the 
usual  up-bringing  of  well-to-do  middle-class 
youth  in  England.  It  is  true  that  Mr.  Ruskin, 
unlike  Mr.  Browning,  went  to  a  University, 
though,   like  him,  he  went  to  no  school;   and 

14 


2IO  Corrected  Impressions. 

\  his  comparative  chastity  of  form  may  be  partly 
ascribed  to  this  frequentation  of  the  Muses. 
But  Christ  Church,  which  does  not  like  to  be 
called  a  "  college  "  at  all,  is  even  now  probably 
the  college  of  both  Universities  in  which  the 
University  and,  strictly  speaking,  collegiate  in- 
fluences are  weakest;  while  for  a  gentleman- 
commoner  in  Mr.  Ruskin's  time  they  were 
weaker  still.  The  shaping,  moulding,  training 
influence  of  the  ordinary  English  liberal  educa- 
tion has  been  abused  as  well  as  lauded,  and 
I  suppose  that  it  may  to  a  certain  extent  and 
in  certain  cases  act  as  a  cramp  and  a  restraint; 
•but  it  certainly  acts  in  a  far  greater  number  as 
a  beneficial  discipline.  Discipline  is  what  Mr. 
Ruskin  has  always  lacked ;  as  well  in  methods  of 
expression  as  in  the  serene  self-confidence  which 
has  enabled  him  to  deliver  himself  on  any  and 
every  subject,  without  any  suspicion  that  he  is 
talking  ill-informed  nonsense.  Discipline  Ox- 
ford did  not  give,  had  indeed  no  full  opportunity 
of  giving,  to  Mr.  Ruskin;  but  she  gave  him, 
there  can  be  no  doubt,  additional  inspiration. 
She  nourished  in  him  that  passion  for  architec- 


Mr.   Ruskin.  211 


ture  which  no  single  city  in  the  United  King- 
dom is  so  richly  dowered  with  the  means  of 
exciting  and  gratifying;  and  she,  no  doubt, 
also  strengthened  in  him  the  general  Romantic 
tendency  of  which  he  is  so  characteristic  an 
exponent. 

For  the  other  part  of  the  matter  it  has  long 
ago  seemed  to  me  —  I  do  not  know  that  I  have 
seen  it  noticed  or  suggested  by  anybody  else  — 
that  the  central  peculiarity  of  Mr.  Ruskin  is  a 
singular  and  almost  unparalleled  union  of  two 
main  characteristics,  one  of  which  is  usually 
thought  of  as  specially  French,  the  other  as 
specially  English.  The  first  is  an  irresistible 
and  all-pervading  tendency  to  generalize,  —  to 
bring  things  under  what,  at  any  rate,  seems 
a  law,  to  erect  schemes,  and  deduce,  and  con- 
nect. The  other  is  the  unconquerable  ethical 
tone  of  all  his  speculations.  To  follow  out  the 
ramifications  of  this  strangely  crossed  nature 
of  his  would  take  a  very  great  deal  of  space, 
and  would  partake  more  of  the  style  of  abstract 
criticism  than  would  perhaps  be  suitable  to  this 
book  and  plan.     But  one  or  two  applications 


212  Corrected  Impressions. 

and  corollaries  of  what  has  just  been  said  may 
be  indicated. 

Thus  it  may  be  pointed  out  that  Mr.  Ruskin's 
extraordinary  insensibility  to  the  ludicrous 
hangs  on  to  both  the  un-English  and  the  English 
sides  of  his  intellectual  temperament.  His 
mania  for  generalizing  blinds  him  to  the  ab- 
surd on  the  one  side,  as  we  constantly  find 
it  doing  in  Continental  thinkers;  his  insa- 
tiable appetite  for  moral  applications,  and  his 
firm  belief  in  his  moral  mission  blind  him,  as 
we  find  these  things  do  often  in  Britons.  When 
Mr.  Ruskin  says  that  a  square  leaf  on  any  tree 
would  be  ugly,  being  a  violation  of  the  law 
of  growth  in  trees,  we  feel  at  once  that  we  are 
in  the  company  of  an  intellectual  kinsman  of 
the  learned  persons  whom  Moliere  satirised. 
He  deprecates  expenditure  on  plate  and  jewels 
(while  admitting  that  "  noble  art  may  occasion- 
ally exist  in  these  ")  because  they  are  matters 
of  ostentation,  a  temptation  to  the  dishonest,  and 
so  on,  —  a  moral  paralogism  which  would  be 
almost  impossible  to  any  one  not  of  British 
blood. 


Mr.  Ruskin.  213 

But  I  must  leave  this  key  to  Mr.  Ruskin  in 
the  hands  of  the  ingenious  reader,  who  will  find 
it  do  a  great  deal  of  unlocking.  A  man  with  an 
ardent  sense  of  duty  combined  with  an  ardent 
desire  to  do  good ;  eager  to  throw  everything 
into  the  form  of  a  general  law,  but  eager  also 
to  give  that  general  law,  directly  or  indirectly, 
mystically  or  simply,  an  ethical  bearing  and 
interpretation;  extremely  fond  of  throwing  his 
discourse  into  an  apparently  argumentative 
form,  but  probably  more  prone  than  any  man 
of  equal  talents  who  has  lived  during  this  cen- 
tury to  logical  fallacies  and  illicit  processes  of 
every  kind,  —  grasp  the  man  as  this,  and  the 
works  will  cease  to  be  a  puzzle  or  an  irrita- 
tion, because  the  reason  of  them  will  at  once 
be  plain. 

And  it  would  be  a  very  great  pity,  indeed,  if 
the  Book  of  Ruskin  were  to  remain  to  any  one 
merely  a  closed  book,  as  irritation  or  as  puzzle. 
For,  if  these  curious  volumes  are  taken  with  a 
due  amount  of  rational  salt,  they  cannot  fail  to 
enlarge  and  exercise  the  tastes  and  powers  of  the 
reader;    while,    if  read  simply  for   enjoyment, 


214  Corrected  Impressions. 

they  will  be  found  to  contain  the  very  finest 
prose  (without  exception  and  beyond  compari- 
son) which  has  been  written  in  English  during 
the  last  half  of  the  nineteeth  century.  The 
great  merit  of  this  prose  is  that  it  is  never,  as 
most  of  the  ornate  prose  styles  of  a  more  recent 
day  are,  affected  and  unnatural.  Great  pains 
have  been  spent  on  the  writing  of  English  prose 
during  the  last  twenty  years  —  greater,  I  think, 
than  had  been  taken  for  several  generations. 
But  the  result  has  almost  always  had  (to  my 
taste  at  least)  something  too  much  of  the  lamp 
—  a  too  constant  reminder  that  here  the  gentle- 
man did  take  great  pains,  that  he  turned  the 
sentence  this  way  and  that  to  convey  an  air  of 
distinction,  that  he  picked  his  words  so  as  to 
give  them,  if  not  quite  a  new  meaning  and  col- 
location, at  any  rate  a  collocation  and  meaning 
as  different  as  possible  from  that  which  they  had 
usually  had.  One  thinks  far  too  often  of  the 
story  of  Paul  de  Saint- Victor  (a  real  artist,  too)  ' 
scattering  single  words  about  a  paper,  and  then 
filling  in  and  writing  up  to  them.  Our  latter-day 
prose  of  this  kind  is  sometimes  eloquent,  but 


Mr.   Ruskin.  215 


it  is  rarely  elegant;  it  is  sometimes  splendid, 
but  it  is  seldom  or  never  at  ease;   it  is  often 
quaint   and   rare   in   embellishment,   but    it    is 
'seldom  or  never  unconscious  of  its  dress. 

Now,  Mr.  Ruskin's  purple  patches  —  despite 
a  rather  too  great  tendency  to  run  not  merely 
into  definitely  rhythmical,  but  into  definitely 
metrical  forms  —  are  never  laboured,  they  never 
suggest  effort,  strain,  or  trick.  He  warms  to 
them  naturally,  he  turns  them  out  without  tak- 
ing his  coat  off.  They  are  to  be  found,  it  is 
true,  mainly,  though  by  no  means  wholly,  in  his 
earlier  books.  The  practice  of  alternately  chat- 
ting and  scolding,  to  which  he  unfortunately 
betook  himself  some  five-and-twenty  years  ago, 
is  not  favourable  to  the  production  of  fine 
English,  unless  the  writer  can  rise  to  the  level 
of  a  real  scBva  indignatio.  This  Mr.  Ruskin  can 
seldom  do  ;  and,  as  has  been  already  noted,  his'' 
weaknesses  never  betray  themselves  so  much  as 
when  he  is  talking  of  what  he  does  not  like. 

But  in  his  early  days  of  enthusiasm  he  was 
often  magnificent  —  no  lesser  word  will  do.  It 
was   some   time   before   I    could   bring  myself 


2i6  Corrected  Impressions. 

(well  knowing  what  the  comparative  result 
would  be)  to  compare  the  second  of  the  two 
recent  volumes  of  selections,  which  cover  his 
whole  work,  with  the  early  and  now  precious 
volume  which  was  published  in  1861,  and  which 
was  perforce  confined  to  the  greater  and  earlier 
books — the  "Modern  Painters,"  the  "Stones 
of  Venice,"  the  "  Seven  Lamps,"  the  "Lectures 
on  Architecture  and  Painting,"  and  a  very  few 
others.  In  this  older  volume  you  will,  no  doubt, 
find  the  crochet  and  the  waywardness,  the  para- 
logism and  the  undue  preaching,  not,  as  he  once 
put  it,  of  "  the  connection  between  art  and 
human  passion"  (which  is  perfectly  true  and 
important),  but  of  that  between  art  and  its 
influence  on  the  life  of  the  artist  (which  is 
chiefly  not  to  the  point).  But  you  will  also 
find  far  more  frequently  than  later  —  indeed, 
in  this  volume  on  almost  every  page  —  a  phras- 
ing so  admirable,  a  selection  of  imagery  so 
fertile  and  felicitous  as  to  compel  admiration, 
even  if  the  matter,  instead  of  being  almost 
always  noble  (if  not  always  quite  sane),  were 
purely  wrongheaded    or    purely    unimportant. 


Mr.   Ruskin.  217 


For  more  than  forty  years  artists  In  flamboy- 
ant prose  have  been  writing  after  and  after 
the  famous  description  of  the  Falls  of  Schaff- 
hausen  in  "  Modern  Painters."  Mr.  Swinburne, 
in  his  "  Blake,"  once  very  nearly,  if  not  quite, 
equalled  it;  all  the  rest  are  nowhere.  The 
"  Stones  of  Venice  "  is  crammed  with  similar 
passages ;  in  fact,  it  is  the  book  of  descriptive 
prose  in  English,  and  all  others  toil  after  it  in 
vain. 

For  happier  expressions  of  crotchety  fancy, 
where  shall  we  look  than  in  the  rather  numer- 
ous passages  where  Mr.  Ruskin  sets  forth  his 
favourite  craze  that  bright  colours  are  virtuous, 
dark  and  neutral  tints  wicked?  The  thing  is 
false,  it  is  almost  silly;  but  it  is  so  charmingly 
put  that  you  chuckle  at  once  with  keen  pleas- 
ure and  mild  scorn.  Also,  the  man  can  ob- 
serve, which  is  the  most  uncommon  of  all  gifts. 
The  fault  of  our  modern  impressionists  lies  in 
just  this  —  that  the  artist  seems  to  think  he 
must  empty  out  of  his  representation  every- 
thing but  the  mere  individual  impression  itself, 
so  that  he  does  not  really  give  what  he  sees, 


21 8  Corrected  Impressions. 

or  what  anybody  sees,  but  what  is  or  might 
be  seen  with  an  arbitrary  subtraction  of  allow- 
ance for  the  seer's  presumed  idiosyncrasy.  This 
is  as  bad  as  the  most  slavish  convention  or  the 
most  exaggerated  personal  crotchet.  Now,  Mr. 
Ruskin  certainly  does  not  minimise  the  personal 
element;  yet  he  can,  when  he  chooses,  keep  it 
to  its  lowest  terms. 

But  I  am  outrunning  my  limits.  To  sum 
up  the  impression  side  of  the  matter,  —  when 
I  was  young,  Mr.  Ruskin's  crotchets  used  to 
irritate  me  more  than  they  ought;  they  now 
irritate  me  hardly  at  all,  and  only  bore  me  a 
little.  But  I  think  I  like  his  beauties  more  than 
ever ;  and  I  am  disposed  to  think,  also,  that  he 
has  brought  more  folk  to  art  than  he  has  ever 
bitten  with  his  own  heresies  about  it. 


Printed  from  Autertcan  Plates 

Ballantyne,    Hanson  &  Co. 

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